SHAJF  FELLOWSHIP  LECTURES,  1S03 


SCHOPENHAUER'S    SYSTEM 


IN    ITS 


PHILOSOPHICAL   SIGNIFICANCE 


"Vitarii  impendere  vero." 

— JrvENAL,  iv.  91. 


SCHOPENHAUEE'S    SYSTEM 


IX    ITS 


PHILOSOPHICAL  SIGnPICANCE 


BY 


'  WILLIAM  CALDWELL,  M.A.,  D.Sc. 

PROFESSOR   OF   MORAL  AND  SOCIAL   PlirLOSOPHV,    NORTinVESTERS"   12^.VER8,TV     U.    V    • 

FORMERLY  ASSISTANT  TO  THE    PROFESSOR  OF   LOO.C  AND   METAPHYSICS,    EDIXBUROH    CXIVERSITY 

AND   EXAMINER    IN    PHILOSOPHY    IN  THE   UNIVERSITY    OF  ST  ANDREWS 


NEW    YORK 

CHARLES    SCEIBNER'S    SONS 

153-157   FIFTH    AVENUE 
1896 


6 


TO 

EMEPvITUS   PROFESSOR   A.   CAMPBELL    ERASER, 

D.C.L.,    LL.D., 

AND 

TO    HIS    SUCCESSOR    IN    THE    CHAIH    OF    HAMILTON, 

PROFESSOR   ANDREW   SETII,    LL.D., 
Ojis  Folume  is  Dctiicatfli     _ 

WITH    THE    ESTEEM    AND    GRATITUDE    OF 
AN    OLD    PUPIL    AND    FRIEND. 


P  K  E  F  A  C  E. 


This  book  is  substantially  the  outcome  of  the  public  lectures 
delivered  by  me  in  the  Logic  class-room  of  the  University  of 
Edinburgh,  in  the  months  of  October  and  November,  1893,  at 
the  close  of  my  tenure  of  the  Shaw  Fellowship. 

Following  the  precedent  of  previous  holders  of  the  Shaw 
Fellowship,  Professor  Sorley  of  Aberdeen  and  Professor  Mac- 
kenzie of  Cardiff,  and  also  in  accordance  with  the  natural 
necessities  of  the  evolution  of  the  work  in  my  own  mind,  I 
have  departed  altogether  from  the  lecture  form,  and  have  pre- 
sented my  matter  in  the  shape  of  several  continuous  philo- 
sophical essays.  Some  of  these  chapters  may  appear  to  be 
of  undue  length.  As  each,  however,  was  intended  to  reflect 
to  some  extent  the  system  of  Schopenhauer  os  a  whole,  as  well 
as  to  indicate  his  views  upon  the  particular  topic  in  question, 
it  r«eemed  undesirable  to  curtail  too  much.  Taken  together, 
they  represent  a  series  of  attempts  to  suggest  the  significance 
of  Schopenhauer's  thought  as  an  organic  whole.  The  order  of 
the  series  is  partly  natural  and  partly  logical. 

As  to  the  justification  for  the  volume,  I  desire  the  title  to 
be  partly  explanatory.  I  have  not  directly  attempted  to 
give  an  exposition,  or  even  an  exposition  and  criticism,  of 
Schopenhauer's  philosophy.  This  has  been  done  sufficiently 
well  in  many  different  ways  by  many  English  and  foreign 


Vlll  PREFACE. 

writers.  I  have  rather  tried  to  connect  Schopenhauer  with 
some  few  broad  lines  of  pliilosophical  and  general  thought  and 
—  so  far  as  I  could  —  with  some  few  brond  principles  of 
human  nature.  It  seems  to  me  that  the  time  has  come  for 
this.  My  best  hope  for  the  book  is  that  it  may  attbrd  reflec- 
tive matter  to  those  who  have,  for  any  reason  whatsoever,  an 
interest  in  Schopenhauer.  Nowadays  it  is  almost  impossible 
to  escape  being  brought  more  or  less  under  his  inlluence.  He 
has  even  got  into  the  comic  papers  of  most  countries.  While 
to  a  certain  extent  presupposing  some  elementary  knowledge 
of  Schopenhauer,^  I  have  tried  to  give  enough  positive  state- 
ment from  and  about  him  to  render  what  I  write  intelligible 
to  the  ordinary  reader. 

I  have  tried  to  strike  a  mean  in  the  matter  of  the  con- 
nection of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  with  his  personality.  I 
am  inclined  to  resent  the  practice  of  attributing  the  exaggera- 
tions of  his  philosophy  to  his  personality,  when  such  attribu- 
tion does  not  rest  upon  a  broad  perception  of  the  philosophy 
of  such  a  personality  as  Schopenhauer's.  It  is  time  the  public 
sliould  be  prevented  from  being  misled  by  much  extravagant 
statement  in  this  connection." 

The  first  chapter  is  general  in  its  character,  and  suggests 
only  the  scope  of  Schopenhauer's  significance  and  the  spirit  in 
which  we  ought  to  study  his  system.     The  next  two  chapters, 

'  Such  knowledge,  for  example,  as  may  be  had  from  a  recent  article  in  the 
'Westminster  lie 'ew '  (April  1895)  by  Mr  E.  Todhuntei',  or  from  Mr  Bailey 
Saunders's  excellent  translations  (published  in  very  convenient  form  by  Sonnen- 
schein),  or  from  such  an  essay  as  that  by  Professor  E.  Rod  in  '  Les  Id<5es  Morales 
du  Temps  Prdsent,'  or  from  the  "  Britannica  "  article  of  Professor  W.  Wallace  (or 
from  my  own  in  the  ninth  edition  of  '  Chambers's  Encyclopedia '),  or  from  Pro- 
fessor W.  Wallace's  book  in  the  "  Great  Writers  "  Series,  or  from  the  instructive 
article  of  the  late  Mr  E.  Wallace  in  the  '  Westminster  Review '  (No.  59,  p.  388). 

"E.g..  "No  philosopher  so  readily  explains  himself  as  Schopenhauer.  His 
philosophy  was  simply  the  formulation  of  his  own  special  disease,  the  expression 
of  his  own  ineffably  petty  and  uncomfortable  disposition.  He  was  a  small 
philosopher  with  a  great  literary  gift." — 'The  Religion  of  a  Literary  Man,'  by 
Richard  le  Gallienne.  I  select  this  quotation  only  on  account  of  its  recent 
character.     Many  others  might  be  given. 


PKEFACE.  IX 

I  imagine,  will  demand  a  somewhat  closer  attention  on  the 
part  of  the  reader  than  the  first.  They  constitute  an  attemi)t 
to  trace  out  the  theoretical  roots  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy.^ 
The  fourth  chapter  occupies  itself  with  the  practical  bondajje 
of  life,  from  which  art  and  ethics  and  religion  are  supposed 
by  many  people  (and  by  Schopenhauer  himself)  to  set  us 
free.  The  following  four  chapters  present  the  Schopenhauer 
that  is  known  to  the  thought  of  the  nineteenth  century. 
Chapter  ix.  tries  to  show  the  fundamental  philosophical  char- 
acter of  Schopenhauer's  thought.  It  takes  up,  incidentally, 
the  threads  of  chapters  ii.  and  iii.,  and  interweaves  them  with 
the  other  chapters  of  the  book  and  with  the  system  as  a 
whole.  Chapter  x.  attempts  some  general  positive  statement 
about  Schopenhauer.  In  it  and  in  the  Epilogue  points  are 
suggested  which  might  form  the  material  for  further  study 
and  exposition.  Before  this,  however,  one  would  have  to 
devote  some  attention  to   von  Hartmann. 

It  was  originally  part  of  my  intention  to  consider  the  gen- 
eral subject  of  pessimism  as  treated  by  both  von  Hartmann 
and  Schopenhauer.  In  view  of  this  I  read  to  a  fair  extent 
into  von  Hartmann,"  but  soon  concluded  that  Schopenhauer, 
in  virtue  of  his  greater  originality  and  attractiveness,  would 
alone  aiibrd  enough  scope  for  my  first  investigation.  There 
are  two  things  that  are  more  satisfactory  in  von  Hartmann 
than  in  Schopenhauer :  first,  his  scholarship,  and  then  tlie 
historical  basis  on  which  he  tries  to  found  pessimism.  I  am 
quite  convinced  that  Schopenhauer  and  von  Hartmann  to- 
gether represent  one-half  of  modern  philosophy.  I  say  of 
modern  philosophy,  because  for  the  purposes  of  general  philo- 
sophy we  still  sit,  and  ought  to  continue  to  sit,  at  the  feet  of 

1  These  chapters  represent  matter  which  I  presented  partly  in  two  papers  in 
'  Mind '  (O.S.,  vol.  xvi.  p.  355  ;  N.S.,  vol.  ii.  p.  188),  and  partly  in  class-room  lectures 
in  Cornell  University,  N.Y. 

2  See  'Mind'  (N.S.,  vol.  ii.  p.  188)  for  a  preliminary  study  of  von  Hartmann's 
theory  of  knowledge. 


X  PREFACE. 

the  Greeks.  It  is  greatly  to  be  regretted  that  Schopenhauer 
did  not  give  more  attention  to  Aristotle  than  he  did.  I  hope 
at  another  time  '  be  able  to  do  greater  justice  to  von  Hart- 
niann  than  I  have  been  able  to  do  in  this  volume. 

I  crave  indulgence  for  the  supreme  liberty  I  have  taken  in 
often  speaking  for  my  author  and  in  often  perhaps  identifying 
my  exposition  or  criticism  or  philosopliy  witli  his  name  or 
his  principles.  If  I  have  made  him  speak  and  appear  to 
be  significant,  that  is  all  I  care  about.  I  have  not  always 
fully  worked  out  what  I  have  suggested,  but  in  this  I  feel 
justified  by  the  nature  of  the  task.  There  are,  of  course, 
many  things  ^  in  Schopenhauer  to  which  little  reference  has 
been  made  here,  and  some  to  which  no  reference  at  all  has 
been  made. 

Xor  have  I  tried  to  free  Schopenhauer  from  the  many 
charges  of  inconsistency  which  may  be  brought  against  him. 
Frauensttidt's  infinite  care  in  this  direction,  although  of  great 
service,  seems  to  me  to  be  often  carried  too  far. 

The  manuscript  and  the  proof-sheets  of  this  work  have 
been  read  by  Professor  James  Seth,  of  the  Chair  of  Moral 
Philosophy,  Cornell  University ;  all  the  proof-sheets  by  Mr 
Henry  Barker,  of  Trinity  College,  Cambridge ;  a  part  of  the 
manuscript  and  a  part  of  the  proof  by  Mr  Eobert  P.  Hardie, 
Lecturer  on  Ancient  Philosophy,  University  of  Edinburgh ;  a 
part  of  the  proof  by  Mr  Norman  M^'Lean,  Fellow  and  Lecturer 
of  Christ's  College,  Cambridge ;  and  the  revised  parts  of  the 
proof,  along  with  some  whole  chapters,  by  my  colleague  at 
Northwestern,  Professor  J.  Scott  Clark,  of  the  Chair  of 
English  Language.  All  these  gentlemen  have  rendered  me 
important  service  by  their  suggestions.     To  other  friends,  also, 


^  Such  are,  for  example,  his  view'  upon  the  psychology  of  paiu,  his  views  upon 
mathematics,  liis  theory  of  colours  and  his  optical  researches,  Ids  opinions  upon 
literature  proper,  the  extent  of  his  knowledge  of  Eastern  religions,  or  his  opinions 
upon  Kant  and  Kant's  works. 


PREFACE.  Xi 

I  feel  indebted  at  tliis  time :  to  some  for  an  active  interest  in 
the  book  or  in  parts  of  it;  and  to  some  whose  friendship  has 
enabled  me  to  understand  much  of  what  I  have  learned  about 
both  philosophy  and  life.  In  the  latter  regard  I  owe  much 
to  nearly  ten  years  of  intercourse  with  Professor  Laurie  of 
Edinburgli  University,  some  of  whose  books  (the  '  Metapliysica  ' 
and  the  'Etliica')  long  ago  revealed  to  me  something  of  the 
reality  and  the  possibilities  of  a  philosophy  of  the  will. 

I  have  endeavoured,  by  the  use  of  the  capital  and  in  other 
ways,  to  call  the  attention  of  the  reader  to  the  diHerence 
between  the  term  "  Ideas "  (the  "  Platonic  Ideas ")  and  the 
term  "ideas"  (sense-phenomena,  objects).  The  abbreviation 
"H.  and  K,"  in  the  footnotes,  refers  to  the  English  translation 
of  Schopenhauer's  '  World  as  Will  and  Idea,'  by  E.  B.  Haklane 
and  J.  Kemp  (Triibner,  1888.  3  vols.)  The  edition  of 
Schopenhauer  I  have  used  is  the  sammtlichc  Wcrke.  Zivcite 
Auflagc.     Neue  Ausgabe.      Leipzig.      Brockhaus.      1888. 

Northwestern  Universitv, 

EvANSTox,  III.,  U.S.A., 

March  U196. 


CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER   I. 

GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER'S   SIGNIFICANCE. 

Scope  of  the  present  Inquiry— Objective  and  Subjective  Elements  in  a  philosophi- 
cal  System -The  Reason  and  the  Emotions— Insight  and  Genius  and  Reason 
—That  whicli  Schopenliauer  compels  Philosophy  to  notice :  Schopenhauer 
and  the  Zeit-Geist  at  the  beginning  of  the  Century— Naturalism  and  Idealism 
—Evolution  and  Hegel  and  Schopenhauer :  The  attitude  of  mind  incident 
to  the  study  of  Schopenhauer  :  The  relation  of  Mind  and  Body— Transcen- 
dentalism and  Positive  Psychology  :  Schopenhauer  and  the  Scientific  Spirit 
—The  Restrictive  and  Negative  Aspects  of  Schopenhauer's  teaching: 
Whether  Schopenhauer's  Philosophy  is  Materialistic:  Whether  Schopen- 
hauer knew  Science— The  Philosophy  of  Genius  :  Schopenhauer's  Platonism 
—The  Reasons  for  his  antipathy  to  the  "  Hegelians  "—His  attitude  to  History 
—His  Significance :  Kant's  influence  over  Schopenhauer— Speculative  Dog- 
matism—Man the  Key  to  the  World  :  The  Philosophy  of  Religion     Pp.  1-59 

CHAPTER   II. 

SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM. 

Some  different  aspects  of  Schopenhauer's  attempt  to  reduce  the  world  to  unity— 
His  Starting-point  in  Philosophy— Idealism  and  the  different  forms  of  the 
same:  I.  Subjective  or  A^ai/ Idealism— The  Reference  of  all  things  to  the 
Knowledge  or  to  the  Activity  of  the  Self-The  Reason  of  Schopenhauer's 
being  so  much  under  the  Influence  of  the  Presuppositions  of  Idealism— The 
Notion  of  a  Bridge  between  the  Subjective  and  the  Objective  ;  II.  Ordinary 
or  Dogmatic  or  Phenomeuological  Idealism— That,  whether  True  or  False, 
Idealism  tends  to  become  Illusionism  —  Hlusionism  iu  Schopenhauer  — 
That,  despite  Illusionism,  Schopenhauer  thinks  Idealism  to  have  been 
proved  true-That  his  own  Positive  Philosophy  is  more  Real  than  Idealism  ; 
III.  Transcendental  Idealism— All  Things  Related  to  Each  Other— And  to 
Will— Or  to  Purpose— Results  .  .  .  .  .  60-111 


XIV  CONTENTS. 


CHAPTER    III. 

SCHOPENHAUER'S  THEORY   OF  KNOWLEDGE. 

The  Relation  sust.aiued  by  the  Systom  of  Schopenhauer  to  the  Theory  of  Know- 
ledge —  What  Schopenhauer  learned  from  Plato  and  Kant — His  Charge 
agninst  Kanfc :  I.  The  Elements  of  Knowledge  to  which  Schopenhauer 
attaclies  Importance :  Perceptions,  both  lower  and  higher — (Schopenhauer 
on  the  Muti'al  Kelations  of  his  three  Elements  of  Knowledge)  ;  Conceptions, 
their  Nature  and  Utility — (Schopenhauer  ever  eager  to  insist  on  the  Dangers 
of  Conceptual  Knowledge)  ;  The  Ideas,  the  higher  perceptions  of  the  mind  ; 
Criticism  of  Schopeidiauer's  treatment  of  these  three  Mental  Elements — 
That  they  ought  not  to  be  so  sharply  marked  off  from  each  other — Nor  fi-om 
our  Total  Experience  of  Reality— A  Theoretical  Reason  for  Schopenhauer's 
lUusionism. — II.  That  Reason  to  Schopenhauer  represents  an  Indirect  Way 
of  reaching  Reality — The  Principle  that  Everything  that  is  in  Reason  comes 
from  Perception — That  Schopenhauer  is  apt  to  recur  to  his  idea  that  Know- 
ledge is  a  poor  way  of  reaching  Reality. — III.  The  idea  that  there  are  Different 
Ways  of  Knowing  Different  Sides  of  Reality  —  Schopenhauer's  Dialectic 
Difficulty  and  the  Different  Forms  that  it  Takes  :  (a)  The  alleged  Opposition 
between  Formal  and  Real  Knowledge — The  Ideas  and  the  Things  of  Sense — 
Schopenhauer's  Attitude  to  the  Alleged  Reliability  of  the  Knowledge  of  the 
Self  ;  (;8)  That  Nature  becomes  more  and  more  difficult  to  Comprehend  as 
we  A?cend  in  the  Scale  of  Being  —  The  Philosophy  of  Causation — That 
Causation  in  the  last  resort  means  Volition — That  Volition,  however,  is 
Difficult  of  Comprehension  ;  (7)  The  Apparent  Difference  between  Fact 
and  Necessity  —  That  Real  Knowledge  has  Little  Form  and  Formal 
Knowledge  Littie  Reality  ;  (5)  That  Knowledge  becomes  Purer  and  more 
Objective  with  tl;e  Growth  of  the  Brain — The  Difficulty  of  this  Position. — 
IV.  Criticism  of  Schopenhauer's  Confusion  between  Consciousness  and  Self- 
Consciousness — That  we  cannot  say  that  Knowledge  Falsifies  or  Phenomen- 
alises  things,  Renders  them  Unknowable. — V.  Some  Theoretical  Advantages 
of  regarding  the  World  as  Will — (Characteristic  Defect  of  Schopenhauer's  in 
regard  to  the  Judgment) — Rdsumd  of  some  Important  Features  of  Schopen- 
hauer's Theory  of  Knowledge    .....  112-170 


CHAPTER   IV. 

THE   BONDAGE    OF   MAN. 

Schopenhauer's  quasi  Positivism  and  Determinism — The  Limitations  of  Know- 
ledge and  the  Primary  Fact  of  Volition — I.  The  Complex  Character  of  Will — 
Conscious  Actions  and  Reflex  Actions — That  Conduct  is  an  Organic  Whole — 
The  Biological  Idea  and  the  Deteiministic  View  of  Conduct — That  in  Will  as 
Rational  Conduct  two  prominent  Psycho-physical  Tendencies  must  be  dis- 
tinguished— How  Conduct  may  be  systematised— The  notion  that  the  Sole 


CONTENTS.  XV 

Function  of  Conceptions  is  to  Furnish  us  with  Motives  to  Action — Whetiier 
this  notion  can  ba  applied  to  the  Fact  (Idea?)  of  Self-Consciousness — That 
Determinism  is  not  necessarily  a  Wholly  Unsatisfactory  Philosophy — What 
the  Science  of  Human  Nature  seems  to  teach  on  the  point — What  a  Liber- 
tarian may  legitimately  contend  for  in  regard  to  Conduct — I'hat  the  Intel- 
lect needs  to  be  schooled  into  true  Service  of  the  Will — What  Self-Knowledge 
or  Objectivity  of  Intellect  can  mean — II.  The  Explanation  of  Human  Life  in 
terms  of  Necessity — Tlie  Conscious  and  the  Uncouscious  in  Man — Have  the 
Ideas  a  Relation  to  the  Will  ? — That  the  Ultimate  Explanation  of  Life  is  a 
Practical  Explanation — Whether  Spontaneity  resi("  js  in  tU;  Intellect  or  the 
Will — That  Schoijenhauer  insists  moro  strongly  on  the  Feebleness  than  on 
the  Utility  of  Thought — What  his  Philosophy  represents  in  this  regard — 
Another  Reason  for  the  Sense  of  Illusion  that  it  seems  lo  awaken — III.  The 
Philosphy  of  Pain — The  Idea  that  Pain  exceeds  Pleasure — The  Real  Cause 
of  the  Pessimistic  Mood — That  Men  seemed  Fated  to  Form  Erroneous  Esti- 
mates about  Life — What  to  Schopenhauer  is  the  Deepest  Pain  in  Life — IV. 
What  this  Chapter  has  Suggested — That  there  is  much  that  is  Illusory  in 
Life  —  History  reveals  a  series  of  Illusions — What  is  most  Depressing  in 
Schopenhauer — Another  Word  on  Freedom — Conclusion         .  171-227 


CHAPTER  V. 
SCHOPENHAUER'S   PHILOSOPHY  OF  ART. 

Schopenhauer's  Treatment  of  Art — As  compared  with  that  of  other  Philosophers 
— Genius  and  Common-sense — The  Emancipating  Intellect  in  Schopenhauer 
— Whether  Schopenhauer  can  allow  for  Spiritual  or  Ideal  Volition — Religion 
as  "Art  and  Science  " — That  Art  is  an  Affair  of  Perception  rather  than  of 
the  Understanding — I.  Knowledge  of  the  Ideas  as  Different  from  Scientific 
Knowledge — Illustration  from  Schopenhauer — Art  and  Insight  into  Human 
Life — That  Matter  cannot  Express  the  Ideas — "  Pure  Cloudless  Knowledge  " 
— That  the  Different  Arts  Express  the  Different  Grades  or  Ideas  of  the  Will 
— The  Uniqueness  of  Artistic  Perception — That  Everything  is  in  a  sense 
Beautiful — II.  The  Philosophy  of  Art  and  the  Philosophy  of  Genius — That 
Schopenhauer  writes  more  upon  t^ie  Insight  afforded  by  Art,  than  upon  the 
Artistic  Sense  for  Life  and  Reality — The  Meaning  of  This — That  Beauty 
should  be  Closely  Connected  with  Life — Art  and  the  Restless  Will — III.  The 
Nature  of  the  Reality  with  which  Art  deals — Schopenhauer's  treatment  of 
Art  too  Negative — Schopenhauer  and  Plato  and  others  upon  the  Nature  of 
Artistic  Reality  .......  228-260 

CHAPTER    VI. 

SCHOPENHAUER'S  rHILOSOPHY   OF  ART — continued. 

(o)  Limits  of  Schopenhauer's  treatment  of  Fine  Art — The  Personal  Equation 
therein — That  his  Treatment  Is  Metaphysical — Transcendentalism  in  Art — 


XVI  CONTENTS. 

Kant's  .Esthetic  Philosophy — Its  Merits,  accordiug  to  Schopenhauer — That 
Art  completes  Intellectual  and  Critical  Philosoi'hy — Tiiat  Schopenhauer's 
Treatment  is  too  Abstract,  too  Unhistorical,  too  Impassive — That  it  Over- 
looks the  Facts  of  Artistic  Production — And  does  not  Connect  Itself  wi*h 
the  Will — Classical  and  Gothic  Architecture,  and  the  Modern  Feeling  for 
Beauty — [P)  Other  Omissions  in  Schopenhauer's  Treatment — Art  and  Illu- 
sionism  and  Realism — (The  Conflict  between  the  Will  and  the  Idea  again) — 
(y)  Schopenhauer's  /Esthetic  and  the  Philosophy  of  the  Universal — Artistic 
Creation  and  Function  and  Development — That  Art  completes  the  Teleo- 
logical  view  of  the  World  and  of  Human  Life — Art  and  Ordinary  Reality — 
Formal  Conditions  of  the  Beautiful  —  Beauty  and  Adaptation  —  That  the 
World  is  what  we  mako  it  to  be — (5)  Beauty  and  Pleasure — (Genius  and 
Life) — The  Height  of  .Esthetic  Feeling — Beauty  and  Life  and  the  Expres- 
sion of  Life — Closing  Reflections  ....  261-305 

CHAPTER    VII. 

SCHOPENHAUER'S   MOKAL  PHILOSOPHY. 

That  to  Schopenhauer  the  Last  Meaning  of  the  World  is  Ethical— I.  The  Fact  of 
Moral  Conduct  the  Key  to  the  Transcendental  Meaning  of  Things  —  The 
Sense  in  which  it  is  this — II.  How  Schopenhauer  approaches  the  Problem  of 
Ethics — What  he  thought  of  tlie  Ethic  of  Socrates— That  True  Nobility  of 
Soul  is  an  Affair  not  of  the  Intellect  but  of  the  AS'ill — Schopenhauer's  Opin- 
ions on  the  Ethic  of  Kant — That  Morality  cannot  be  explained  in  an  "  Exter- 
nal" Manner— Schopenhauer's  own  Statement  of  the  Facts  of  Morality — His 
Black  Picture  of  the  Facts  of  Human  Nature — Sympathy  and  the  Denial  of 
all  Selfish  Volition — That  in  these  two  things  a  Metaphysical  Perception  is 
involved — The  "  Affirmation  of  the  Ideas  " — III.  Criticism  of  Schopenhauer's 
Views  upon  Ethics — Whether  he  overlooks  Duty — Whether  his  Facts  are 
Typical — Whether  he  is  fair  to  Socrates  and  Kant — His  Attitude  to  Life 
that  of  an  Extremist — That  the  Spirit  of  the  Eighteenth  Century  is  Re- 
flected in  his  Difficulties — That  he  overlooks  the  Complexity  of  the  Facts  of 
Conduct — Evolution  and  Sovereignty  and  Naturalism — The  Fundamental 
Fact  of  Morality  to  Schopenhauer — The  Will  in  a  State  of  Natural  Conflict 
with  Itself — The  Facts  of  Feeling  and  Volition  more  important  to  Ethics 
than  Abstract  or  A  Priori  Knowledge — That  the  Knowledge  implied  in 
Goodness  is  Intuitive  and  Mystical,  not  Rational — IV.  The  Facts  of  Conduct 
and  Illusionism — The  Difficulty  of  Pronouncing  Correct  Moral  Judgments — 
What  alone  we  Know  about  Ourselves — Schopenhauer's  Philosophy  of  Con- 
science— Erroneous  Assumptions  upon  which  Ordinary  Discussions  of  Free- 
dom proceed — Whether  Men  Know  what  they  Mean  by  Freedom — V.  The 
Difficulty  of  a  Beginning  in  Ethical  Philosophy — The  Difficulty  of  Knowing 
the  Moral  Self — The  Natural  Element  of  Illusion  and  Contradiction  in  the 
Moral  Life — Whether  this  is  surmounted  by  the  Philosophy  of  Spirit — VI. 
Significance  of  the  Opposition  between  Egoism  and  Altruism—  The  Possible 
Irrelevancy  and  Superficiality  of  a  One-sided  Altruism — Some  Practical  Re- 
flections— That  Ethics  leaves  us  with  a  Dualism  or  Illusionism  306-366 


CONTEXTS,  XVll 


CHAPTER    VIII. 

schopeniiaueh's  philosophy  of  religion. 

Schopenliauer'a  Philosophy  of  Religion  and  the  llc.<t  of  hia  Thought — I.  Tlie 
Uniqueness  of  his  Treatment  "f  Religion — His  Objections  to  Ordinary  Dog- 
matic Religion — To  Rationalism — The  Kinds  of  Religious  Phenomena  that 
lie  Studies — The  Religious  Literature  he  cares  for — Formal  Defects  of  the 
Various  Philosophies  of  Religion — How  Schopenhauer  Classifies  Religions — 
Hia  Opinions  on  the  Leading  Philosophical  and  Historical  Religious  Systems 
—  II.  What  his  own  Philosophy  of  Religion  is— The  Eternal  Necessity  of  all 
Things— The  Evil  Inherent  in  the  Will — The  Negation  of  the  Merely  Natural 
in  our  Lives,  and  the  Consequences  of  this  Negation — The  Philosophy  of  the 
Fact  of  Death — That  in  Schopenhauer's  Philosophy  the  Strongest  Possible 
Theoretical  Support  for  Altruism  may  be  found — How  Schopenhauer  Thinks 
of  the  World  and  of  Ordinary  Reality — Why  we  Cannot  literally  Deny  the 
World — Schopenhauer's  Attitude  to  the  "  Two  Cardinal  Points  "  in  Religion 
— A  Reflection  upon  the  Philosophy  of  the  Idea — The  Necessity  of  taking 
firm  hold  of  the  Positive  Element  in  Schopenhauer's  Philosophy  —  The 
Supreme  Difiiculty  in  the  Study  of  Schopenhauer — The  Crux  of  the  Religious 
Problem — III.  That  Religion  Presupposes  Pessimism — That  it  Presupposes 
Idealism — That  its  Origins  must  be  studied  in  Connection  with  the  Will— 
The  Inadequacy  of  Rationalism  in  Religion — Limitations  of  Schopenhauer's 
Treatment  of  Religion  —  What  Objective  Reality  in  Religion  means — The 
Philosophy  of  the  Noticm  of  the  Objective — The  "  Argument  from  Design  " 
— The  Vitality  and  the  History  of  Religions — IV.  Theoretical  Defects  in 
Schopenhauer's  Philosophy  of  Religion — His  Attitude  to  Apologetic — The 
Nemesis  that  Overtakes  his  Hostility  to  Rationalism  and  "  Externalism  " — 
lUusionism  again — How  to  take  hold  of  the  Positive  Elements  in  his  Teach- 
ing— The  Value  of  Eastern  Religions — The  World  Illusory  to  the  Egoist — 
That  Philosophy  Should  Not  Doubt  the  Reality  of  its  Conclusions — That 
Schopenhauer  is  a  true  Kantian — How  he  Looks  at  the  History  of  the  World 
—Perfection  and  Reality  an  Affair  of  the  Will  .  ,  367-431 


CHAPTER    IX. 

THE  METAPHYSIC   OF  SCHOPENHAUER. 

The  Spirit  of  Schopenhauer's  Metaphysic — I.  Illusionism — That  each  Phase  of 
the  System  seems  to  find  Illusion  in  our  Experience — The  Apparent  Op- 
position between  the  Will  and  the  Idea — II.  The  Main  Facts  of  the  System 
— Its  Fundamental  Idea — The  Relative  Truth  of  the  Same — That  the  World 
is  Best  Understood  When  Understood  Practically  —That  in  both  Philosophy 
and  Science  Ontologj'  becomes  Teleology — The  "  Personal  Equation  "  in  Il- 
lusionism— That  we  Must  Not  be  Misled  by  the  Fact  that  Reality  Presents 
Itself  to  us  in  Different  Phases — A  certain  Amount  of  Illusionism  Incident 


XVUl  CONTKNTS. 


t"  tlio  IMuloHiiiihy  of  Will— 111.  TImt  Selioponlmuor  Chuhoh  uh  to  Alter  our 
liloiiH  ulioiit  tln^  I'rnliliMii  of  I'hiloMophy — And  to  Look  at.  tho  Solf  in  a  Dif- 
foi-f>iit  M'ay — Timl  Miiny  Imu'Ih  hih'iu  to  JtiHlify  tlio  hlxpodicncy  of  tiiis — 1\'. 
CrilifiHin  (if  Si'hoiioniiuuor'H  Inability  lo  (.'orrclatt*  Dill'iTfiit,  WuyH  of  Look- 
ing at  llculity,  ami  of  IiIh  Itlon  tliat  tlio  World  i»  NoooHHarily  lInint<tliinil)io  — 
Till'  lUuHioniMni  Incidont  to  the  IMiiioHopliy  of  I'ur|)on(<  or  Volition— Tiiat 
Individual  l'".llort  in  ni)t  NocoHsai-ily  Moivnii-gloHM-  Si'ho|>(jnliauorV  ll(<tUwtionH 
on  tho  Point — Powitivo  l-'loniimt  in  lllunioniHUi — What  a  Toloologioal  View  of 
tlio  Worlil  niiMUM  -  How  PliiloHoiihy  might  .SyNtcinivtiHc*  Knowledge  and 
Koality-'riu'  l-'xtroinc  Hanger  of  liolioving  that  ThingH  aro  not  what  they 
Appear  to  be — Philosoi>hy  A  Jieboura — V.  Tho  Foundations  of  tho  HyMteni, 
again  The  Hroad  Viow  of  Will  -That  wt>  Know  tho  World  thi-ongh  Action 
--Tho  Intolloct  only  a  Partial  Si,>n»o  for  Ui'ality  Not  that  (ho  Worlil  is  li'- 
rntiouftl — Our  Knowlodgo  as  Ileal  as  tho  Continuity  of  oui-  l']xporionco— That 
Nature  has  Intondod  thai  wo  shoidd  Think  ouv  Livos  Schoponhiiuor  on  tho 
Intellect  and  tho  Will  -His  No(?loitof  Fooling— And  of  History  •132-JHr. 


CIIAPTKR    X. 

THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF  THE   SYSTEM. 

Scho]ienhauor's  Suggostivoncss  — Philosophical  Altinitios  of  tlu"  DitVoront  Parts  of 
the  System — Some  of  tho  Main  Lessons  it  teaches  To  whom  these  arc  of  N'aluo 
— Tho  Noeoasity  of  Pain  and  Oilliculty — That  Schopenhauer  Himself  Knows 
that  Most  F.stimatoM  of  Life  aro  Subjective- -That  Philosophy  itself  Must  be 
Viewed  as  an  Ftl'ort — -What  Uenlity  is,  on  Schopenhauer's  Principles— -Illus- 
tration of  this  from  Physics  and  Psychology — Tho  "  Relativity  "  of  Dolinitions 
of  Heality — That  Schopenhauer's  Philosoiihy  soonis  to  take  the  World  as  it 
is — That  Man's  Life  is  an  Kll'ort  to  Idealise  tho  Heal — How  Kxiiorienco  Ought 
to  be  Int-orpreted — -The  Economy  of  Pain  and  Disappointment — Schopen- 
hauer and  Naturalism  and  Evolution  —  Some  Metaphysical  Advantages  of 
Regarding  the  World  as  Will — Logical  Dangers  of  Idealism — That  Idealism 
has  a  Tendency  to  Pessimism — Tho  Element  of  Contradiction  and  Illusion 
in  Experience — What  to  do  in  View  of  tho  Existence  of  this  Element — Criti- 
cism and  Optimism  and  Pessimism — Concluding  Reflections    .  48(3-521 

EPAOGUE 522-.')27 


INDEX 529-538 


SCnOPENHAUER'S   SYSTEM. 


CHAPTER    I. 

GENERAL    VIEW    OF    SCIlOrENIIAUEIl's    SIGNIFICANCE. 

"  Die  Zcit  wild  koininen,  wo,  wcr  iiicht  weisa,  whh  ich  iiber  einen  Gegen- 
«tand  gcsiigt  liivbe,  sicli  alfl  IgHorauten  blosKHtuUt." ' 

"Whoever,  I  say, hiw  with  me  gained  this  conviction  .  .  .  will  recogniHc 
this  will  of  which  wo  aro  speaking  not  only  in  those  phenomenal  existenccH 
which  exactly  resemble  his  own,  in  men  and  animals  as  their  inmost  nature, 
but  the  course  of  reflection  will  lead  him  to  recognise  the  force  which  ger- 
minates and  vegetates  in  the  plant,  and  indeed  the  force  through  which  the 
crystal  is  formed,  that  by  which  the  magnet  turns  to  the  north  pole,  the 
force  whose  shock  he  experiences  from  the  contact  of  two  different  kinds  of 
metal,  the  force  which  appears  in  the  elective  alllnities  of  matter  as  repul- 
siim  and  attraction,  decomposition  and  combination,  and,  lastly,  even  gravi- 
tation, which  acts  so  powerfully  throughout  matter,  draws  the  stone  to  the 
earth  and  the  earth  to  the  sun, — all  these,  I  say,  he  will  recognise  as  differ- 
ent only  in  their  phenomenal  existence,  but  in  their  inner  nature  as  iden- 
tical, as  that  which  is  directly  known  to  him  so  intimately  and  so  much 
better  than  anything  else,  and  which  in  its  most  distinct  manifestation  is 
called  loill."  '^ 

The  philosophy  of  Schopenhauer  has  been  for  some  years 
and  is  now  in  most  civilised  countries  matter  of  public  and 
private  interest  and  surmise,  ridicule,  inquiry,  and  study. 
Wliile   this    may   not    recommend    the    system   to   the   pure 

'  Scliopenhauer  an  Frauenstadt,  10th  Feb.  1856. 

-  Schopenhauer's  Welt  als  Wille,  &c.,  i.  131.  Eng.  transl.  by  Haldane  and 
Kemp,  i.  142.  /*  ,     - 

A'  - 


2  Schopenhauer's  system. 

philosopher,  who  is  aware  that  for  the  last  three-quarters  of 
this  century  speculative  philosophy  may  bo  said  to  have  been 
in  a  period  of  decadence,  the  fact  of  widespread  interest  be- 
speaks for  it  a  presumption  that  in  it  surely  are  to  be  found 
many  elements  appealing  to  many  minds.  In  the  following 
pages  an  attempt  will  be  made  to  exhibit  the  extent  of  its 
breadth  and  its  depth.  Different  lines  of  interpretation  and 
criticism  have  been  followed  by  different  writers  in  explaining 
Schopenhauer,  such  as  the  study  of  the  system  chrough  the 
personality  of  its  author,  or  through  his  philosophical  and 
political  environment,  or  from  the  side  of  some  of  the  great 
ultimate  ideas  of  philosophy ;  and  all  of  these  have  their 
justification.  We  shall  be  concerned  with  the  general  sig- 
nificance of  the  system,  and  hope  to  bring  many  of  these 
lines  incidentally  to  a  focus.  But  if  Schopenhauer  is  really 
a  great  philosopher,  he  will  have  something  to  say  that  ap- 
plies to  all  time ;  and  it  is  the  possibility  of  this  which 
determines  our  inquiry.  We  shall  seek  also  to  discover 
where  we  stand  in  philosophy  after  Schopenhauer.  Schopen- 
hauer prophesied  his  own  immortality  as  a  thinker,  and  said 
that  his  works  would  be  read  when  those  of  Hegel  and 
Fichte  and  other  dii  majores  of  philosophy  would  lie  on 
the  shelves  of  the  scholar  or  of  the  seller  of  old  books,  and 
his  words  have  come  true.     Why  is  he  read  ? 

Fichte  said,  as  we  know,  that  the  kind  of  philosophy  a 
man  chooses  depends  on  the  kind  of  a  man  he  is.  This  is 
true,  but  the  significance  of  the  assertion  is  not  at  first  sight 
appar  nt.  Granting  that  a  man's  philosophy — idealism  or 
mate'  ialism,  pessimism  or  optimism — depends  on  the  kind  of 
man  he  is,  what  does  this  prove  about  philosophy  ?  Does 
philosophy  simply  follow  temperament,  and  is  it  wholly  a 
matter  of  temperament  ?  Again,  does  a  man's  choice  in  gen- 
eral depend  on  the  kind  of  man  he  is,  and  if  so,  is  there 
any  freedom  of  choice  ?     Both   these   questions   raise  them- 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      3 

selves  naturally  in  the  ca?e  of  Schopenhauer's  personality,  and 
what  is  more  vital  (for  a  philosophy  includes  not  only  man 
but  the  world),  in  the  case  of  his  philosophy.^  It  will  become 
evident  from  our  author  that  it  is  not  really  a  reproach  to 
philosophy  to  say  that  it  in  a  sense  expresses  temperament  or 
character.  Philosophy  indeed  cannot  neglect  the  temperament 
of  man,  for  tlie  temperament  of  man  is  a  reflex  or  a  differen- 
tiation of  his  sense  for  reality,  and  may  therefore  actually  give 
to  philosophy  some  of  its  facts.  Character,  too,  as  an  estab- 
lished disposition  or  state  of  the  whole  man,  must  reveal  the 
various  tendencies  of  man's  psychical  and  organic  life  in  a 
state  either  of  harmony  or  of  discord ;  and  consequently  the 
study  of  character  will  help  us  to  know  whether  a  given  state- 
ment about  the  nature  of  the  world  is,  or  is  not,  such  as  to 
appeal  and  commend  itself  to  human  nature.  It  is  perhaps 
possible,  for  example,  through  the  study  of  temperament  and 
character,  to  strike  a  balance  between  what  Hume  called  the 
"  easy  and  obvious  "  ^  way  of  philosophising  and  the  "  abstract 
and  profound,"  and  this  too  without  degrading  philosophy. 
Of  course  we  might  simply  state  it  to  be  a  fact  that,  from  the 
standpoint  of  comparative  psychology  or  anthropology,  various 
systems  of  thought  and  belief  have  been  expressive  only  of 
differences  in  the  character  and  temperament  of  men,  and 
might  allow  the  logic  of  system-building  to  square  itself  with 
this  fact.  Any  sense  of  humiliation  which  we  experience  from 
the  reflection  that  it  is  unphilosophical  for  philosophy  to  follow 
temperament,  arises  out  of  the  fact  of  our  minds  being  still 
ruled  by  the  old  philosophical  fallacy  that  reason  is  superior 
to  emotion,  or  the  form  of  thought  to  the  matter  of  thought. 
One  of  the  most  instructive  lessons  we  shall  have  to  learn 
from  Schopenhauer  will  have  a  bearing  on  this  very  question  of 
the  relation  of  reason  to  emotion,  and  of  the  formal  or  rational 

^  Of.  infra,  chap.  iv.  p.  177  et  passim. 

'  Inquiry  concerning  Human  Understanding,  section  i. 


4  Schopenhauer's  system. 

aspects  of  things  to  their  material  or  empirical  aspects ;  for  his 
entire  system  lives  and  moves  on  the  strength  of  such  opposi- 
tions and  on  the  controversies  arising  out  of  them.  Indeed, 
the  whole  secret  of  the  study  of  Schopenhauer  lies  in  the  effort 
that  it  compels  us  to  make  to  study  the  value  of  the  inferential 
conclusions  of  our  intellectual  faculties  in  face  of  the  natural 
conclusions  to  which  we  are  impelled  by  our  natural  instincts. 
The  refrain  of  his  philosophy  throughout  is  that  man  is  at 
bottom  nothing  but  a  horrible  wild  animal,  and  yet  he  recog- 
nises perfectly  well  at  the  same  time  tliat  man  will  insist 
upon  applying  his  intellect  in  a  free  speculative  manner  to  the 
problem  of  the  nature  of  reality. 

Like  many  other  philosophers,  Schopenhauer  is  perfectly 
explicit  on  the  point  that  the  only  thing  that  can  properly 
be  called  knowledge  is  abstract  conceptual  knowledge.  In 
this  sense,  he  says,  "  the  proper  antithesis  to  knowing  is  feel- 
ing." He  is  so  convinced  that  abstract  conceptual  knowledge 
is  the  only  knowledge,  that  he  is  not  inclined  to  attach  any 
cognitive  significance  to  any  kind  of  feeling.  "  The  word 
feeling  has  throughout  a  negative  connotation — namely  this, 
that  something  whicii  is  actually  present  to  our  consciousness 
is  not  a  concept,  not  abstract  knowledge  of  the  reason."  This 
is  of  course  utterly  false  in  point  of  fact,  and  we  soon  see 
that  Schopenhauer's  statement  of  fact  is  here  largely  coloured 
by  his  preconceived  theory.  What  is  really  interesting  and 
significant,  however,  in  Schopenhauer  is  not  what  he  says — 
his  psychology  has  too  many  crudities  to  admit  of  being  scien- 
tifically expounded — but  what  he  does  with  what  he  says. 
The  one  kind  of  feeling  in  which  we  find  Schopenhauer  to  be 
supremely  interested  is  instinct,  and  all  the  difficulties  of  his 
philosophy  arise  from  the  fact  that,  in  spite  of  his  prejudice 
against  feeling  as  irrational,  he  does  find  in  instinct  a  kind  of 
positive  knowledge,  which  he  through  all  his  writing  and 
thinking  hurls  up  against  the  abstract  or  inferential  know- 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER'S   SIONIFIOANCE.       5 

ledge  of  the  understanding  or  the  reason.  The  duty  that  falls 
to  the  interpreter  of  Schopenhauer's  system  is  to  extract  the 
positive  knowledge  or  consciousness  that  is  contained  in  feel- 
ing, and  to  connect  it  with  the  positive  knowledge  or  con- 
sciousness that  is  contained  in  the  concept,  or  in  reason.  ]5y 
so  doing  he  will  not  only  make  a  synthesis  of  the  different 
elements  in  Schopenhauer's  own  system,  but  relate  much  of 
Schopenhauer's  apparently  negative  work  to  the  positive  work 
of  his  predecessors  and  contemporaries  in  philosophy.  Schopen- 
hauer was  himself  unable  to  connect  the  philosophy  of  cog- 
nition with  the  philosophy  of  instinct  or  impulse,  and  this  is 
one  of  the  reasons  why  his  system  presents  the  appearance  of 
being  throughout  a  sort  of  illusionism  in  which  the  higher  and 
lower  phases  of  man's  activity  seem  alternately  to  contend 
with  and  to  cancel  each  other. 

Of  course  if  a  philosophy  includes  not  only  man  but  the 
world,  there  ought  to  be  some  impersonal  as  well  as  personal 
elements  in  a  philosophical  system.  That  part  of  philosophy 
which  is  called  metaphysic  is,  in  idea  at  least,  simply  the 
most  scientific  statement  possible  of  the  nature  of  the  world, 
what  in  German  would  be  called  J)er  Inbeyriff  dcr  Gesammt- 
Wisscnscliafl,  a  methodised  statement  of  the  laws  and  prin- 
ciples of  all  knowledge  and  all  science.  We  have  to  say 
"  in  idea "  because,  however  earnest  our  purpose  may  be  to 
study  the  world  in  an  objective  and  impersonal  way,  experi- 
ence seems  to  show  that  the  slightest  science  and  the  "  slight- 
est philosophy "  bring  us  back  to  man  as  at  least  the  most 
characteristic  object  in  the  world.  Plato  and  Aristotle  and 
Kant  all  complete  their  enumeration  of  the  points  of  view 
from  which  the  world  can  be  regarded,  by  an  insistanc3  on 
the  idea  of  the  good  or  the  good  for  man ;  aud  this  is  in  a 
sense  a  subjective  or  personal  conception.  It  is  because  the 
philosophy  of  Hegel  does  not  do  this,  but  ends  in  the  "  Idea  " 
in  and  for  itself  rather  than  in  the  idea  of  a  good  for  man  as 


6  Schopenhauer's  system. 

man,  that  the  mind  whicli  has  been  imbued  with  the  spirit  of 
the  Hegelian  dialectic  has  to  seek  over  again  for  some  point 
of  I'apport  with  the  real  world,  with  ostensible  tci'ra  firma. 
Schopenhauer  passes  quite  naturally  from  a  merely  critical 
study  of  the  world  of  experience  to  a  teleological  study  of 
the  end.  of  action,  and  the  general  outcome  of  his  system  is 
to  substitute  teleology  for  ontology,  or  to  resolve  ontology — 
the  study  of  entities — into  teleology — the  study  of  purposes. 
To  him,  as  one  knows,  the  will  is  everything.  It  is  in  fact 
hard  to  find  what  might  be  called  a  purely  objective  study 
of  the  world.  The  nearest  s  bstitute  for  it  must  be  sought 
among  the  Greeks ;  for  with  them  it  is  not  in  such  an  anti- 
thesis as  that  of  subject  and  object,  the  result  of  much  head- 
sore  travelling  on  the  via  longa  of  modern  philosophy,  that  we 
find  the  highest  categories  of  thought,  and  therefore  the  last 
fulcra  of  metaphysicp.1  thinking,  but  in  the  "  one "  and  the 
"  many  "  of  Plato  and  the  Bvvafiig  and  ivipyeia  of  Aristotle. 
But  even  the  Greeics  never  completely  eliminated  the  subjec- 
tive aspects  of  philosophy  from  their  systems.  Aristotle,  for 
example,  in  giving  an  analysis  of  moral  freedom,  found  that, 
although  human  action  seemed  to  a  certain  extent  only  a  par- 
ticular kind  of  phenomenal  causation,  man  had  yet  to  be  re- 
garded as  more  than  a  merely  natural  object,  since  he  has  a 
principle  of  causation  in  himself,^  It  is,  after  all,  too,  only 
because  the  Greeks  had  to  envisage  all  the  categories  and 
distinctions  of  their  thought  in  an  objective  way  so  as  to 
suit  the  genius  of  their  thought,  that  their  writings  seem  to 
be  less  rent  by  the  difficulties  of  dualism  than  those  of  most 
modern  philosophers. 

But  if  metaphysic  be  to  a  certain  extent  the  systeraatisation 
of  science,  there  ought  to  be  somehow  by  this  time  a  body  of 
doctrine  common  to  all  philosophers  about  the  ways  in  which 

^  Cf.  Eth.  Nic,  iii.  3.    .    .    .    ^  apX^  ^•'  ""t^  (iidri  rh  Ka6'  ilKatrra  iv  oh  v 


GENERAL  VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       7 

man  should  regard  the  world,  a  recognition  of  the  possible 
ways  in  which  he  does,  and  must,  regard  the  universe  in 
which  he  finds  liimself.  Sucli  a  schematic  construction  of 
tlie  world,  or  of  the  knowablc  world,  would  seem  to  represent 
the  only  possible  philosophy.  If  it  is  objected  that  this  is 
only  the  critical  idea  of  philosophy,  it  must  be  confessed 
that  it  is.  Another  main  lesson  we  shall  have  to  learn 
from  Schopenhauer  is,  that  although  Kant  virtually  exploded 
and  exposed  ontological  dogmatism,  dogmatism  about  the 
essence  of  the  universe,  for  ever  in  philosophy,  we  have  been 
very  slow  in  learning  his  lesson  ;  and  that,  in  general,  wher- 
ever philosophy  has  become  dogmatic,  it  has  ventured  beyond 
the  merely  critical  or  reflective  plane  of  thought  on  to  the 
scientific  or  observational  plane,  and  by  so  doing  has  virtually 
submitted  itself  to  all  the  tests  of  inductive  philosophy  and 
historically  recorded  fact. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  a  protest  written  "  in  large 
letters "  against  the  idea  that  a  complete  knowledge  of  the 
essence  of  the  world  and  the  purpose  of  the  world  is  to  be 
found  in  reason  alone.  This  negative  aspect  of  his  teaching 
is  really  the  continuation  or  the  drawing  to  a  conclusion  of 
the  criticism  of  all  speculative  dogmatism  instituted  by  Kant 
in  the  '  Criticism  of  Pure  Eeason.'  lieason  to  Schopenhauer 
is  passive  in  its  nature  and  not  active,  and  can  only  system- 
atise the  material  brought  to  it  by  experience,  so  that  the 
full  meaning  of  reality  can  be  known  only  in  direct  experience 
and  not  in  the  abstractions  of  mere  thought.  Doubtless  he 
himself  falls  into  a  new  dogmatism  about  the  nature  of  the 
world,  a  dogmatism  of  the  will  instead  of  a  dogmatism  of  the 
reason  {jpanthclism  instead  of  panlogisni),  and  so  lays  himself 
open  to  the  strictures  of  scientific  observation,  which  has  no 
difficulty  in  showing  that  there  are  other  things  in  tlie  world 
besides  "willing"  and  "rushing"  and  "striving."  Schopenhauer 
is,  in  fact,  in  some  respects  less  successful  in  his  positive  than 


8  '  Schopenhauer's  system. 

in  his  negative  philosophy,  and  we  shall  be  throughout  this 
volume  less  occupied  with  the  attempt  to  treat  the  world  as 
a  phenomenon  of  the  will,  than  with  the  attempt  to  show 
the  significance  of  the  line  of  thought  which  led  to  the  sub- 
stitution of  will  as  a  world-principle  instead  of  reason.  It 
may  be  justifiable  to  condemn  a  mere  philosophy  of  the 
reason  without  doing  violence  to  the  fact  that  reason  is  of 
distinct  service  to  us  in  the  interpretation  of  experience,  and 
our  author  will  teach  us  this  in  spite  of  his  own  great  incon- 
sistency in  the  matter.  And  so  far  as  the  connection  with 
Kant  goes,  we  may  learn  from  Schopenhauer  that  the  dog- 
matism of  criticism,  the  dogmatism  about  what  we  can  with 
our  unassisted  faculties  know  about  the  nature  of  the  world, 
is  perhaps  the  only  dogmatism  that  will  stand  the  test  of  time. 
Philosophy  begins  in  wonder,  and  philosophical  criticism  is 
simply  wonder  made  conscious  of  itself,  of  its  proper  scope 
and  its  proper  limitations. 

But  there  is  more  in  philosophy  than  pure  raetaphysic,  or, 
at  any  rate,  there  have  been  included  under  metaphysic  ques- 
tions where  temperament  has  more  to  show  for  itself  than  in 
the  treatment  of  the  world  merely  from  the  standpoint  of  the 
categories  or  the  principles  of  the  understanding.  Kant,  for 
example,  included  in  philosophy  the  question,  "  What  can  I 
hope  ?  "  and  the  question,  "  What  ought  I  to  do  ?  "  as  well  as 
the  question,  "  What  can  I  know  ? "  Now  it  would  seem  im- 
possible to  give  an  answer  to  the  question,  "  What  can  I 
hope  ?  "  and  still  more  to  the  question,  "  What  ought  I  to  do  ?  " 
without  considering  the  question,  "What  would  I  ?  "  or  "What 
do  I  wish  ? "  In  short,  any  supposed  "  end  "  that  the  system 
of  things  may  have — icj  it  is  about  the  end  of  things  that  man 
emphatically  asks,  when  he  asks,  "  What  can  I  hope  ?  " — must 
be  an  end  that  embraces  man  and  the  feelings  and  nature  which 
he  finds  himself  to  possess,  must  be  an  end  for  man  as  Aris- 
totle said.     Of  course  from  a  certain  point  of  view  it  seems  a 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       9 

piece  of  assumption  on  the  part  of  man  to  think  that  he  has  a 
right  to  hope  for  anything,  as  many  men  partly  outside  phil- 
osophy, like  Carlyle,  are  never  tired  of  reminding  us.  We 
must  waive,  however,  just  now,  this  contention,  and  think  of 
the  extent  to  which  the  feelings  of  man  may  conceivably  enter 
into  the  computation  of  the  philosopher  in  pronouncing  his 
judgment  upon  the  tendency  or  the  end  of  things.  It  is 
immaterial  for  our  purpose  whether  the  doctrine  of  teleology 
(the  name  that  philosophers  give  to  this  whole  line  of  con- 
sideration) be  regarded  as  falling  inside  or  outside  that  strict 
body  of  doctrine  which  might  be  called  metaphysic  proper. 
There  is  at  least  a  distinction  between  that  part  of  philosophy 
which  sets  forth  merely  the  reason  or  order  that  is  in  things, 
and  that  other  part  which  attempts  somehow  to  give  man  what 
has  been  aptly  called  a  "  synthesis  of  the  world  in  terms  of  his 
emotions  "  and  of  his  practical  nature  :  "  attempts  to  give,"  be- 
cause a  negative  philosophy  like  pessimism  or  scepticism  may 
teach  that  the  world  is  essentially  unsatisfactory  to  man,  and 
thus  end  not  by  answering  our  question  but  by  explaining  it 
away,  leaving  us  with  scientific  metaphysic,  the  metaphysic  of 
the  reason,  as  the  only  solid  part  of  philosophy  at  all. 

We  may  at  least  say  that  a  philosophical  teleology  or  meta- 
physic of  ethics,  in  its  answer  to  the  question  of  the  end  of 
things  and  the  real  warrant  of  our  hopes,  must  give  us  a  kind 
of  philosophy  that  is  suited  to  all  kinds  of  men,  to  the  man  of 
feeling  and  the  ordinary  man  as  well  as  to  the  man  of  reason 
and  genius.  As  Schopenhauer  somewhere  says,  ih  is  a  much 
more  vital  criticism  of  a  man  to  say  that  he  has  a  feeble  heart 
although  he  has  great  mental  powers,  than  to  say  his  heart  is 
good  but  his  intellect  is  weak.  Now  it  is  a  matter  ci  literary 
history  that  German  philosophy,  from  Leibnitz  and  Wolff  to 
Kant  and  Hegel,  gave  to  the  ethical  problem  answers  that  were 
prevailingly,  or  almost  exclusively,  intellectual.  The  philosophy 
of  that  period,  as  a  rule,  made  so  little  of  the  natural  or  direct 


10  Schopenhauer's  system. 

feelings  of  man  that  it  almost  seemed,  like  Spinoza,  to  "  throw 
ethics  out  of  ethics."     It  is  an  old  error,  indeed,  of  philosophy 
to  make  more  of  philosophic  virtue  than  of  civic  virtue,  to 
convert  virtually  the  Stoic  maxim  "  Follow  Nature  "  into  the 
maxim  "  Study  Nature,"  and  there  have  never  been  wanting 
those  who  have  tried  by  all  means  in  their  power  to  convert 
into  a  positive  cult  the  old  error  of  seeking  above  all  things 
wisdom.     It  is  enough  for  man  to  know,  to  understand, — him- 
self or  anything  else, — we  are  told ;  happiness  somehow  will 
follow  tliat.     The  philosophy  which  Fichte  sought  to  found  on 
the  main  critical  ideas  of  Kant  is  primarily  a  philosophy  of 
action ;  but  even  he  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  freed  himself 
from  a  belief  in  the  spontaneity  and  the  all-sufificingness  of 
reason,  an  idea  which  the  Critical  Philosophy  used  as  an  in- 
strument or  weapon,  and  did  not  test  while  yet  seeking  to 
test  all  other  things  with  it.     It  is  true  that  in  reading  Fichte 
one  gets  the  impression  that  feeling  is  in  a  sense  an  embodi- 
ment of  reason,  as  it  is  to  Aristotle  (ra  iraOri  Xoyot  tvvXot) ; 
but  precisely  because  it  is  too  much  this,  and  because  the  man 
of  genius  or  reason  is  regarded  as  superior  after  ail  to  the  man 
of  action,  we  feel  Fichte's  analysis  of  action  to  be  inadequate 
to  the  facts  of  life.     His  optimism,  too,  is  not  like  that  of 
the  Christian  religion,  which  first  goes  down  into  the  "  mire  " 
of  human  nature  before  seeking  to  put  it  on  the  "rock"  of 
strength  and  aspiration ;  it  moves  en  such  a  high  plane  that 
it  only  appeals  to  the  man  "  who  is  in  a  sense  good  already." 
It  is  one  of  the  main  merits  of  Schopenhauer  to ,  have  chal- 
lenged, and  on  the  whole  successfully  challenged,  this  vaunted 
spontaneity  of  reason  which  was  of  course  an  integral  part  of 
Kant's  philosophy,  and  a  root-assumption  of  Hegel's  from  first 
to  last.     One  is  always  reading  in  Hegel  of  "just  letting  pure 
reoson  go,"  float  as  it  were  into  its  own  ether.     As  if  "  pure 
reason  "  carried  everything  with  it !     In  the  '  Phsenomenology  ' 
we  read  that  the  "conception  of  philosophy  is  the  idea  that  thinks 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       11 

itself,"  and  that  the  "  object  of  philosophy  is  the  notion  in  all 
the  movements  of  its  development,"  "  that  truth  is  the  move- 
ment of  truth  in  and  for  itself,"  and  that "  reason  is  to  become 
all  reality " ;  and  all  these  phrases  indicate  what  is  perfectly 
well  recognised  to  be  the  spirit  of  Hegel's  whole  philosophy. 
"  The  Idea  freely  lets  itself  go  out  of  itself,  while  yet  resting 
in  itself,  and  remaining  absolutely  secure  of  itself."  ^  As  "  pure 
reason  "  means  in  general  to  Schopenhauer  pure  nonsense,  we 
may  well  pause  at  the  outset  over  the  conception  of  philo- 
sophy as  to  some  extent  necessarily  an  expression  of  tempera- 
ment, or  of  natural  feeling,  or  of  character.  In  this  conception 
there  may  be  an  element  of  truth. 

The  feelings  play  a  tremendous  part  in  Schopenhauer's 
system,  and  this  certainly  explains  the  human  interest  that 
attaches  itself  to  his  writings.  People  are  in  general  far  more 
ready  to  listen  to  a  terrible  lie  or  a  great  half-truth  about 
their  passions,  than  to  careful  reasoning  about  the  nature  of 
tlie  intellect.  To  take  an  extreme  instance,  the  case  of  the 
greatest  feeling  which  man  is  supposed  to  have  (an  "  affect " 
or  feeling  which  is  also  an  impulse  or  passion  in  the  strictest 
sense),  the  feeling  of  love,  Schopenhauer  more  than  once 
expresses,  as  do  M.  Eenan  and  others,  the  greatest  surprise 
that  philosophy  has  almost  entirely  neglected  the  study  of  the 
attraction  of  the  sexes,  which  "  shows  itself,"  in  his  eyes, 
"  next  to  the  will  to  live  "  (which  in  fact  it  is  according  to 
liira)  "  as  the  strongest  and  most  active  of  all  impulses.  It 
claims  continually  quite  half  of  the  energies  and  thoughts  of 
the  younger  half  of  mankind,  and  it  is  the  ultimate  aim  of  all 
human  effort.  It  has  an  injurious  influence  on  the  most 
important  affairs,  and  breaks  up  at  any  hour  the  most  serious 
pursuits,  setting  occasionally  the  greatest  heads  into  temporary 
confusion.  It  breaks  up  important  relations,  tears  asunder 
the   strongest   bonds,   takes   sometimes    life    itself  or  health, 

'  Hegel.     By  Edward  Caird,  LL.D.  (Blackwoods'  Philosophical  Classicb),  p.  197. 


12  Schopenhauer's  system. 

sometimes  riches,  rank,  and  happiness,  as  its  offering,  and 
makes  even  the  honest  unscrupulous,  the  faithful  unfaithful, 
and  in  fact  is  on  the  whole  a  malevolent  demon."  xt  is  not 
only,  hovrever,  on  the  influence  of  sexual  love  that  Schopen- 
hauer writes  at  length  in  his  system.  All  the  feelings  and 
impulses  are  made  the  subject-matter  of  his  thought ;  so  much 
80,  indeed,  that  his  system  seems  as  much  a  pathology  as  a 
philosophy  of  human  nature.  He  enlarges  on  the  effect  of 
fright,  anger,  emulation,  joy,  fear  upon  the  intellect,  maintain- 
ing chat  in  general  the  intellect  cannot  work  freely  while 
these  feelings  are  present  to  influence  and  to  warp  its  deci- 
sions, and  that  a  calm  quiet  judgment  upon  life,  such  as  phil- 
osophy should  aim  at,  is  a  matter  of  the  very  greatest  difficulty. 
Such  a  judgment  is  difficult  because  it  involves  a  solution  of 
the  question  about  the  relation  of  the  automatic  and  spon- 
taneous and  instinctive  tendencies  in  man  to  his  reflective 
and  deliberative  and  rational  tendencies.  And  the  whole 
philosophy  of  this  question  lies  open  in  Schopenhauer,  partly 
bolved  and  partly  unsolved.  We  may  say,  of  course,  with 
the  evolutionists,  that  the  difficulty  is  largely  one  of  our  own 
making,  because  as  a  matter  of  fact  reason  itself  is  only  an 
instinct,  more  complex  perhaps  than  other  instincts,  but  still 
an  instinct  whose  workings  we  may  scientifically  desciibe  and 
determine.  This  idea  is  expressed  in  Schopenhauer,  and  it 
involves  the  question  of  a  purely  naturalistic  treatment  of 
man  being  taken  to  be  t;he  final  philosophy  of  human  action. 
If,  however,  we  regard  reason  as  somehow  superior  to  instinct 
and  passion,  as  partly  directive  of  them,  we  raise  the  question 
how  that  which  is  seemingly  inevitable  and  automatic  in  its 
workings  (passion  and  impulse)  can  be  thought  of  as  capable 
of  being  controlled  from  without.  Ought  man  indeed  to  con- 
trol passion  and  instinct,  if  these  be  the  legacy  which  nature 
has  left  to  him  ?  Is  not  instinct  after  all  more  powerful  than 
reason,  and  does  it  not  cover  a  far  larger  area  of  life  ?     Is  not 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF  SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       13 

instinct,  according  to  Evolution,  the  organised  experience  of 
the  past  ?  Schopenhauer  in  short  illustrates  and  expresses 
all  the  difficulties  incident  to  the  effort  which  the  nineteenth 
century  has  had  to  make  to  correlate  what  was  previously 
regarded  to  be  characteristic  of  the  animals  with  what  was 
thought  to  be  peculiar  to  man. 

It  is  the  service  of  Schopenhauer  to  have  reversed  the 
whole  process  of  German  philosophy,  and  to  have  looked  at 
man  from  the  side  of  irrational  action  and  passion,  things  to 
which  Kant's  ethics  and  Hegel's  system  had  done  scant 
justice.  No  man  ever  felt  more  deeply  or  more  consist- 
ently than  Schopenhauer  how  thin  and  hollow  and  super- 
ficial any  merely  intellectual  philosophy  of  life  was.  He 
saw  what  Vauvenargues  meant  when  he  said,  "  Toutes  les 
(jrandes  pensies  viennent  du  cceur."  The  idea  that  an  organ, 
I  the  brain,^  which  can  "  only  work  for  a  few  hours  at  a  stretch," 
and  is  dependent  upon  the  "  humours  and  tension  of  the 
nerves  which  constantly  change  with  the  hours,  days,  and 
years,"  should  be  regarded  as  equal  to  solving  the  riddle  of 
\  the  world,  appeared  to  him  ridiculous.  He  always  insisted 
■  that  the  quality  of  knowledge  was  more  important  than  its 
quantity,  and  that  we  should  strive  rather  to  "  gain  insight " 
than  to  add  to  our  knowledge.  If  we  were  dependent  on 
the  amount  of  our  knowledge,  no  man,  he  suggests,  could 
judge  of  life  until  he  had  reached  the  end  of  it,  and  at  that 
time  the  intellect  or  the  brain  could  not  be  relied  upon  to 
interpret  what  had  been  experienced,  A  clear  and  pure  and 
direct  intuition  into  life,  a  whole  sense  for  reality,  always 
weighed  with  Schopenhauer  far  more  than  the  greatest  power 
of  abstract  thought.  He  admired,  for  example,  Kant's  power 
of  abstract  thought,  but,  like  Heine,  he  could  never  think  of 
Kant  as  a  genius  comparable  to  Plato  or  Buddha.     Scholars 

I       ^  It  is  essential  in  studying  Schopenhauer  to  remember  tliat  "  mind  "  and 
"  brain  "  are  convertible  terms.  .,    , 


14  schopenrauer's  system. 

in  like  manner,  he  always  maintained,  learned  from  books, 
while  the  real  genius  read  in  the  book  of  the  world.  Again, 
"  God  save  us,"  he  said  once,  in  writing  of  his  mother,  "  from 
women  whose  soul  has  shot  up  into  mere  intellect ! " 

While  Schopenhauer  had  the  fullest  sympathy  with  the 
attitude  of  the  wise  man  toward  the  ills  and  accidents  of  life 
as  something  merely  inevitable — to  be  borne  quietly,  in  fact 
— and  for  the  mental  rest  which  the  insight  of  genius  brings 
with  it,  he  had  a  profound  disbelief  in  and  antipathy  to 
the  philosophy  of  the  reason  as  being  a  cold  and  external 
way  of  looking  at  life.  He  is,  strange  to  say,  at  once  an 
iconoclast  of  speculative  systems  as  such  and  a  believer  in 
genius-worship,  tending,  like  his  talented  disciple  Nietsche,^ 
to  judge  of  a  state  or  a  people  or  an  epoch  by  its  capacity  to 
be  or  not  to  be  a  foster-mother  of  great  minds.  Many  men 
like  Herder  and  Jacobi  and  Schiller  and  Goethe  had  felt 
the  intensely  formal  and  abstract  character  of  the  philosophy 
of  Kant,  but  it  was  left  to  Schopenhauer  to  point  out  to 
philosophy  the  direction  in  which  a  theory  of  the  emotions 
and  activities  of  man  could  be  sought.  One  of  our  hardest 
problems,  however,  will  be-  just  to  reconcile  Schopenhauer's 
teaching  on  instinct  and  passion,  with  his  notorious  belief  in 
what  he  called  genius  and  the  pure  insight  of  genius. 

To  take  another  example,  all  students  of  philosophy  have 
in  reading  Kant  found  it  very  difficult  to  decide  whether  or 
not  man  is  free  when  he  does  wrong.  Wrong  or  passionate 
action  is  something  that  has  really  no  place  in  Kant ;  it  is 
action  which  is  inexplicable  just  as  it  is  in  Plato,  where 
man  is  "  mastered  by  passion "  when  he  does  wrong,  and 
where  Socrates  cannot  see  how  one  "  can  be  knowingly  bad." 

^  Cf.  Unzeitgemiisse  Betrachtungen :  Schopenhauer  als  Erzieher,  a.  21  et 
passim.  Schopenhauer  often  talks  of  the  "secret  awe"  with  which  we  ought  to 
regard  the  work  of  genius.  Tlie  contemplation  of  such  work  is  to  him  (see  chaps. 
V,  and  vi. }  a  step  towards  the  emancipation  of  the  mind. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       15 

It  would  ceicainly  be  a  fine  thing  for  the  human  race  did 
evil  and  the  bad  play  no  part  in  a  man's  mental  system,  but 
the  fact  remains  that  society  through  the  state  punishes  the 
evil-doer.  Hegel,  as  we  know,  makes  out  the  culprit  to  be 
free  when  he  repents  and  accepts  his  punishment,  but  evades 
for  the  student  the  question  about  the  freedom  or  necessity 
of  the  man's  power  of  action  before  he  is  convicted.  Hegel, 
that  is,  tends  to  a  large  extent  to  face  questions  of  psycho- 
logy and  ethics  from  the  standpoint  of  other  sciences,  such  as 
jurisprudence  and  theology.  In  general  Hegel  works  syn- 
thetically through  man  and  the  sciences,  from  the  individual 
consciousness  to  the  cosmic  consciousness,  from  the  merely 
natural  to  the  spiritual,  from  the  mere  idea  of  a  thing  to 
the  thing  itself,  from  possibility  to  actuality,  from  the  higher 
sciences  to  the  lower,  or  from  the  lower  sciences  {e.g.,  an- 
thropology) to  the  higher  {e.g.,  psychology) ;  and  it  is  just 
because  he  seems  to  do  this  on  the  strength  of  the  mere 
assumption,  that  of  course  philosophy  must  be  different  from 
science  and  must  set  forth  only  the  universal  element  in 
things,  without  apparently  having  first  done  full  justice  to 
Kant's  criticism  of  all  the  highest  ideas  of  the  reason,  that 
one  feels  Hegel's  general  procedure  to  be, pretty  well  "  in  the 
air."  It  was  just  this  question  why  we  should  seek  to  pass 
so  easily  from  one  plane  of  thought  to  another,  from  matter 
say  to  spirit,  that  the  human  mind  was  beginning  to  ask  at 
the  commencement  of  this  century — and  Hegel  seemed  to  be 
in  the  aether  without  ever  having  been  seen  to  leave  the  earth, 
or  to  construct  his  balloon.  A  balloon  too,  as  some  one  has 
said,  is  a  "  very  fine  thing,  if  one  does  not  wish  to  go  any- 
where in  particular."  And  we  are  never  sure  of  our  direction 
in  Hegel;  whether,  indeed,  he  is  working  downwards  from 
theology  to  metaphysics,  or  upwards  from  nature  to  spirit,  or 
in  a  circle,  whether  analytically  or  synthetically. 

It  is  no  doubt  intellectually  satisfactory  to  think  the  world 


16  Schopenhauer's  system. 

downwards,  or  from  the  point  of  view  of  "  the  whole  " ;  man 
had  done  so  for  two  thousand  years  before  Schopenhauer,  he 
had  liad  gods  and  heroes  for  his  ancestors,  and  "  trailed  clouds 
of  glory"  after  him,  and  the  like.  The  nineteenth  century 
began  to  look  at  the  world  from  below  upwards,  and  Schopen- 
hauer was  its  philosophical  mouthpiece.  And  Schopenhauer 
could  never  have  done  the  work  he  did  had  he  not  been  a 
man  of  titanic  feeling  as  well  as  of  titanic  intellect.  TIk; 
irrational  or  da3monic  element  in  Schopenhauer  was  as  strong 
as  the  rational  or  regulative ;  and  his  experience  of  life  was 
such  as  to  bring  the  non-rational  side  of  things  prominently 
before  his  mind,  and  to  make  him  seek  an  explanation  of  it. 
In  the  Kanto-Hegelian  philosophy,  as  indeed  in  philosophy 
generally  before  Schopenhauer,  evil  and  passion  and  the 
irrational  had  simply  been  marked  with  a  minus  quantity 
before  it;  and  if  Schopenliauer  had  not  been  a  man  who  had 
more  interest  in  the  failures  in  life  and  nature  than  in  the 
successes,  in  the  bondage  and  necessity  of  man  than  in  his 
liberty  and  freedom,  he  could  not  have  done  the  work  he  did 
in  philosophy.  What  we  want  to  learn  from  Schopenhauer  is 
not  that  it  is  as  easy  to  read  the  world  from  below  upwards 
as  from  above  dowr\wards,  so  that  we  may  put  Schopenhauer 
and  Hegel  together  and  state  the  world  as  "  a  sum  that  comes 
out  in  two  ways  " ;  but  that  both  these  ways  of  regarding  the 
world  are  to  a  great  extent  partial,  and  that  most  philosophies 
indeed  have  been  partial  ways  of  viewing  the  world. 

The  personal  element  that  one  usually  studies  in  the  case 
of  a  philosopher  is  the  extent  to  which  he  is  influenced  by 
the  ideas  of  his  time  about  man  and  the  world.  It  is  well 
known  that  nearly  all  the  great  philosophers  have  been  men 
who  were  well  acquainted  with  all  the  knowledge  of  their 
time,  and  that  most  great  systems  can  be  regarded  as  the 
highest  theoretical  expression  of  the  ideas  of  an  age  on  what 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      17 

is  knowable.  Schopenhauer's  system,  like  the  rest,  is  cer- 
tainly all  this,  and  has  its  place  in  the  history  of  hunmn 
thought  as  the  more  or  less  unitied  or  systematic  expression 
of  some  of  the  leading  tendencies  of  nineteenth  -  century 
thinking.  Schopenhauer  is  the  last  of  the  great  original 
speculative  philosopliers  after  Kant ;  and  in  studying  his 
system,  we  study  in  a  sense  the  attitude  of  speculative  phil- 
osophy to  the  march  of  the  critical  and  historical  and  scien- 
tific thought  of  our  century.  He  is  the  natural  man  facing 
the  idealism  of  art  and  philosophy — the  natural  man  of  whom 
Darwin  and  Haeckel  and  Spencer  have  written  in  the  natural 
sciences,  and  Rousseau  and  the  anarchists  and  socialists  in  the 
political  sciences,  and  M.  Zola  and  the  realists  in  literature 
proper.  The  Idealism  of  art  and  philosophy  and  religion  ! 
That  to  Schopenhauer  is  a  fact  of  the  world  just  as  nmch  as 
the  things  about  which  physiology  and  zoology  speak.  It  is 
in  fact  infinitely  more,  he  thinks ;  and  if  philosophy  cannot 
retain  its  hold  on  idealism  while  doing  full  justice  to  natural- 
ism, then  in  his  eyes  it  fails  in  its  mission. 

Schopenhauer's  published  works  supply  an  extensive  repcr- 
toire  of  art  -  criticism  and  of  the  philosophy  of  art  and  of 
the  philosophy  of  religion  and  mysticism.  He  classifies  the 
arts,  and  holds  music  to  be  the  chief  of  all  the  arts,  and 
to  be  in  fact  the  best  key  to  reality ;  and  he  finds  in  art  and 
in  religious  quietism  and  mysticism  the  means  of  "  overcoming 
the  world."  The  natural  man,  as  Schopenhauer  sees  him, 
is  really  antagonistic  to  all  these  things.  He  needs  to 
be  "born  again"  before  he  can  appreciate  them,  and  when 
he  is  "  born  again  "  he  seeks,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  to 
escape  as  much  as  possible  from  the  natural  life  which  he 
feels  to  be  in  direct  contradiction  to  the  real  life  of  the 
restored  mind.  The  parallelism  to  Christianity  is  obviously 
very  close,  and  it  has  to  be  confessed  that  however  much 
iSchopenhauer  deprecates  the  idea  of  the  mind  that  is  truly 


18  Schopenhauer's  system.     , 

philosophical  seeking  for  religious  consolation,  the  metaphysi- 
cal scheme  ,/hich  ho  gives  to  the  world  is  in  its  final  out- 
come a  scheme  of  salvation.  Ho  believes  that  annihilation 
and  not  immortality  is  the  only  guerdon  for  man,  and  in 
this  we  certainly  reach  the  limits  of  naturalism.  Schopen- 
hauer is  a  pessimist  to  the  last,  because  the  "  light  from 
Heaven "  in  the  "  pure  intuitions "  of  art  and  of  "  perfect 
goodness  "  and  of  "  perfect  insight  "  is  a  light  that  "  leads 
astray  " ;  it  is  only  a  lurid  flicker  of  light,  a  will-o'-the-wisp 
after  all.  He  makes  us  think  that  art  and  religion  take  us 
out  of  life,  and  away  from  it,  rather  than  more  deeply  and 
truly  into  it.  How  is  it  that  these  things  fail  Schopenhauer 
at  the  very  point  where  they  should  help  him  ? 

Before  Schopenhauer  the  current  idea  on  the  matter  practi- 
cally was,  that  the  natural  man  or  human  beast  had  as  little 
place  in  philosophy,  had  as  little  to  do  with  it,  as  he  had  with 
the  "  kingdom  of  grace  "  of  the  theologians.  The  baptism  of 
pure  reason  was  virtually  thought  necessary  to  make  man 
a  fit  student  of  philosophy,  and  Schelling  indeed  said  so, 
advocating  the  need  of  a  special  faculty  for  philosophy. 
German  philosophy  had  certainly  forgotten  that  it  was  the 
reputed  glory  of  Socrates  to  have  brought  philosophy  down 
from  heaven  to  earth  and  made  her  dwell  in  cities  and 
market-places,  and  it  was  only  through  the  appearance  of 
a  great  original  untamed  force  like  Schopenhauer  in  the  arena 
of  philosophy  that  philosophy  was  called  back  from  spinning 
metaphysical  subtleties  to  an  honest,  positive,  and  laborious 
attempt  to  understand  the  actual  world  of  natural  birth  and 
maturity  and  decay.  Not  that  Schopenhauer  himself  was 
uninfluenced  by  the  idea  of  the  "  flights  of  genius  "  {Genu- 
schwilngc)  of  the  Eomanticists  and  of  Fichte  and  Schelling,  but 
only  that  he  insisted  that  philosophy  should  walk  along  the 
earth  with  the  hete  humaine  before  thinking  of  Pegasus-liko 
flights  in  the  air. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       19 

No  doubt  in  snying  this,  one  does  in  a  sense  suggest 
the  reflection  that,  if  Scliopenhauer  in  the  nineteenth  century 
proposed  a  return  to  naturalism,  or  even  placed  philosophy  at 
the  point  of  view  of  naturalism,  he  was  taking  a  backward 
instead  of  a  forward  step,  since  even  Kant,  not  to  mention  his 
successors  in  German  philosophy,  may  be  said  to  have  freed 
philosophy  and  man  from  the  chains  of  the  naturalism  and 
superficial  emp'ricisra  that  almost  conquered  the  world  in 
the  eighteenth  century.  Two  or  three  things  may  be  said  in 
answer  to  this  reflection.  In  the  first  place,  the  naturalism 
with  wliich  philosopliy  is  confronted  in  Schopenhauer  is  the 
naturalism  not  of  the  eighteenth  but  of  the  nineteenth  century, 
a  naturalism  whose  real  drift  Schopenhauer  divined  before 
Comte  and  Darwin  and  Spencer  had  written.  "  Each  indi- 
vidual effort  of  the  will  may  be  seen  in  the  difference  of 
organic  form  it  brings  about.  The  nature  of  the  place,  for 
example,  in  which  its  prey  dwells  determines  the  shape  of 
an  animal."  He  early  accepted  the  idea  of  the  descent  of 
man's  body  from  a  lower  organism,  and  seems  to  have  specu- 
lated on  the  consequences  of  that  theory,  before  others  had 
raced  the  theory  itself.  "  If  Nature  had  only  taken  its  last 
step  to  man  from  an  elephant  instead  of  from  an  ape,  how 
different  would  man  then  have  been !  He  would  have  been 
an  intelligent  elephant,  or  an  intelligent  dog,  instead  of  an 
intelligent  monkey."  ^  Schopenhauer,  in  point  of  fact,  thrust 
upon  philosophy  the  duty  of  squaring  itself  not  with  the 
atomistic,  mechanical,  physical  naturalism  of  the  eighteenth 
century,  but  with  the  organic,  evolutionary,  biological,  and 
psychical  naturalism  of  the  nineteenth.  It  may  be  recognised 
at  the  end  of  this  century  that  the  whole  genesis-philosophy 
of  Evolution  is  a  piece  of  unproved  and  unprovable  dog- 
matism. Evolution  refers  to  process,  and  not  to  origin.  But 
whatever  truth  or  untruth  there  lay  in  Evolution,  Schopen- 

^  Aus  Schopenhauer's  haudschrift.  Nachlass,  s.  348. 


20  Schopenhauer's  system. 

hauer  was  one  of  the  first  to  be  willing  to  go  jiisqu'au  hout  in 
the  matter.  We  must  remember  that  owing  to  the  interest  of 
the  English  mind  in  German  idealism,  after  idealism  had 
ceased  to  have  an  influence  in  Germany, — an  interest  fostered 
by  Coleridge  and  Carlyle,  and  then  by  the  Scottish  and 
Enr^lish  Hegelian  teachers  of  philosophy, — we  have  become 
blinded  to  tLo  fact  that  Schopenhauer  was  a  true  successor  of 
Kant,  living  and  writing  in  the  very  years  when  Hegel  was 
ascending  and  filling  the  philosophical  horizon. 

It  is  moreover  largely  owing  to  the  fact  that  Hegel  was  the 
triumphant  philosopher  at  once  of  the  political  restoration 
period  and  of  the  literary  renaissance  period  in  Germany,  that 
the  work  of  Schopenhauer  on  the  more  purely  universal  and 
personal  (as  opposed  to  the  historical  and  impersonal  ^)  aspects 
of  the  philosophical  problem  was  so  completely  neglected  by  a 
patriotic  and  aspiring  public.  Say  what  one  will  about  Hegel, 
he  is  pre-eminently  the  philosopher  of  the  early  restoration 
years  of  the  nineteenth  century ;  he  gave  thinking  Germans 
what  they  seemed  for  a  fatal  moment  to  have  lost  in  the 
revolution  period.  Professor  A.  Seth"  says  that  it  is  the 
growing  feeling  of  many  students  that  Hegel's  real  Antceus- 
like  strength  lies  in  the  ground  of  history.  While  one  may 
not  be  altogether  inclined  to  acquiesce  in  the  feeling  of  those 
who  entertain  this  opinion,  in  so  far  as  they  fail  to  take 
account  of  Hegel's  unparalleled  dialectic  ability,  the  outcome 
of  the  opinion  may  be  taken  to  mean  that  it  is  impossible  to 
understand  Hegel  apart  from  history.  Schopenhauer  on  the 
contrary  faces  the  philosophical  problem  as  having  an  interest 

^  By  this  it  is  meant  that  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  occupied  with  tlie 
eternal  question  of  how  far  the  individual  man  can  know  the  ultimate  meaning 
of  the  world,  and  of  how  much  meaning  the  world  may  have  for  him  as  an 
individual.  Hegel's  philosophy,  on  the  contrary  (fortunately  for  Hegel  him- 
self), gave  men  a  complete  justification  of  the  history  and  policy  of  the  German 
nation. 

2  From  Kant  to  Hegel,  p.  169. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF    SCHOPENHAUER  S   SIGNIFICANCE.       21 

for  the  individual  independently  of  his  place  in  history.  Time, 
to  Schopenhauer,  was  merely  a  form  of  our  thinking ;  and  to 
him  the  individual  really  confronted  the  world  now  with  as 
pronounced  a  sense  of  wonder  and  mystery  as  he  had  on  the 
morning  of  creation.  The  species  "  man "  was  to  him  an 
eternally  new  and  an  eternally  old  phenomenon,  a  timeless 
assertion  of  the  will  to  live.  The  philosophy  of  history  con- 
sequently had  no  meaning  for  him ;  he  only  cared,  like  John 
the  Baptist,  about  the  timeless  nature  of  the  world  and  of 
the  individual.  In  nations  as  nations  he  had  little  interest, 
and  even  less  in  the  Germany  which  after  1815  was  only 
liecoming  something  more  than  a  mere  aggregate  of  individual 
territories.  Prussia  he  hated,  and  in  his  private  life  he  lived 
aloof  from  all  the  struggles  of  the  century,  from  all  the  efforts 
and  aspirations  of  la  souveraine  canaille.  Patriotism  he  held 
to  be  a  spurious  virtue  resting  on  ignorance  and  prejudice ;  ^ 
and  he  had  too  little  faith  in  average  human  nature  to  believe 
at  all  in  democracy.  And  so,  in  his  thought,  it  is  only  the 
destiny  of  the  individual  and  of  his  knowledge,  and  the  seem- 
ingly nugatory  character  of  all  that  the  mere  individual  can 
do,  that  give  him  food  for  reflection.  "  Eadem  scd  aliter"  is 
all  that  he  said  about  history.  To  have  read  Herodotus  was 
quite  enough  in  that  regard. 

The  "onfusions  then  in  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  (and  his 
whole  philosophy  is  a  philosophy  of  confusionism  or  illusion- 
ism  ")  are  the  oiitf'ome  of  the  attempt  of  the  "  ape  and  tiger  " 
]»liilosophy  to  break  in  upon  the  glorious  inheritance  of  the 
idealised  human  person.  He  was  once  plunged  for  days  into 
reflection  over  an  interesting  ape  that  had  been  brought  to 

'  "  Der  Patriotismus,  wenn  er  iin  Reiehe  der  Wissenschaften  sich  geltend 
iiuichen  will,  ein  schmutziger  Geselle  i.st,  den  man  hinauswerfen  soil.  Denn  was 
kann  iinpertinenter  sein,  al**  da,  wo  das  rein  und  allgemeiu  Menschliche  betrieben 
wird  .  .  .  seine  Vorliebe  fiir  die  Nation,  welclier  .  .  .  u.s.w." — 'Parerga,'  Werke, 
'.  523. 
-  Cf.  supra,  p.  5.  -     , 


22  SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 

Frankfort :  its  eyes  seemed  to  him  like  those  of  "  the  prophet " 
gazing  over  the  "  wilderness  "  into  the  "  promised  land  "  (man's 
mind).  His  system  represents  the  birth-throes  of  the  idea  of 
evolution,  at  first  stupidly  thought  to  suggest  a  process  that 
had  happened  in  time  (instead  of  a  timeless  process  as  in 
Aristotle  and  Heraclitus).  A  student  needs  to  feel  at  once  the 
awe  of  Kant  for  the  "  starry  heaven  above  and  the  moral  law 
within,"  and  the  surprise  engendered  by  a  lamp-light  inspec- 
tion of  the  similarity  in  structure  between  the  brain  of  a  man 
and  that  of  an  ape,  to  be  in  a  sympathetic  attitude  for  the 
study  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy,  "  Nothing  is  better 
calculated  to  lead  us  to  a  knowledge  of  the  identity  of  what 
is  essential  in  the  characteristics  of  brutes  and  men  than  U 
baring  to  do  somewhat  with  zoology  and  anatomy." 

So  far  indeed  is  Schopenhauer  from  being  a  retrograde 
philosopher  that  he  is  a  direct  successor  of  Kant, — perhaps 
on  an  opposite  line  to  that  of  Hegel, — continuing  to  study 
the  real  as  a  philosopher,  not  the  real,  it  is  true,  of  mere 
naturalism,  but  the  real  of  nascent  and  all- conquering  evo- 
lutionism. Hegel's  philosophy  is  also  a  study  in  evolution ; 
in  fact  it  is  an  evolution,  a  metaphysical  evolution.  But  it 
is  one  of  the  most  serious  problems  in  the  history  oi  philo- 
sopliy  to  study  Hegel's  dialectic  evolution  in  relation  to  what 
is  ordinarily  meant  and  scientifically  meant  by  evolution. 
Von  Hartmanu  rightly  insists  that  much  seeming  evolution  iu 
Hegel  is  only  an  evolution  of  ideas  in  Hegel's  brain.^  All 
students  of  Hegel  have  felt  this,  and  felt  it  most  acutely  at 
the  moment  when  a  proper  understanding  of  science  and 
nature  seems  obtainable,  only  if  we  have  the  courage  to 
throw  the  lumber  of  his  whole  method  off  our  shoulders. 
It  would  certainly  be  rash  to  hint  that  Schopenhauer 
clearly   recognises   the   difference   between   metaphysical  and 

^  Cf.  von  Hartmanu,  Das  philosophische  Dreigestirn  dea  ueuu.  Jahrli.  (s.  609, 

Studieu  u.  Aufsiitze).  ,     ,;        ■ 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's    SIGNIFICANCE.       23 

scientific  or  historical  evolution.  We  have  little  interest  in 
making  out  either  philosopher  to  be  less  culpable  than  he 
seems  to  be,  but  we  must  try  to  see  how,  on  a  rough  pro- 
visional acceptance  of  the  evolutionary  hypothesis,  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy  stands  nearer  both  to  science  and  to  life 
tlian  Hegel's  absolute  idealism. 

Any  one  who  is  acquainted  with  the  history  of  nineteen  th- 
century  thinking  would  say  that  one  of  its  great  characteristic 
achievements  is  to  have  shown  nature  to  include  both  what 
was  known  previously  as  the  natural  and  what  was  known 
previously  as  the  supernatural.  John  Stuart  Mill,  standing  at 
its  centre  and  being  for  Englishmen  one  of  the  most  typical 
minds  of  the  century,  thought  of  nature  as  including  both 
plienomena  and  causes,  both  the  world  and  God,  as  it  were, 
nature  and  grace,  phenomena  and  noumena.  We  all  know  how 
the  noumenal  or  supra-sensuous  world  even  in  Kant  seems  to 
iJoat  in  aether,  just  as  it  does  in  Plato,  and  never  to  be  com- 
pletely brought  into  real  relation  with  the  actual  world  with  all 
its  fulness  of  life  and  colour.  Hegel,  on  the  contrary,  thought 
of  himself  as  the  modern  Aristotle,  giving  us  the  concrete  uni- 
versal f-r  the  abstract  universal,  a  new  God  of  spirit  for  the 
dead  mover  of  matter  of  eighteenth-century  theism  and  ma- 
terialism ;  but  it  is  pretty  generally  agreed  that  his  natural 
philosophy  is  one  of  forms  and  words  rather  than  of  real 
things  and  real  forces.  Schopenhauer  simply  thrust  himself 
into  the  philosophical  world,  and  by  his  unsparing  iconoclasm, 
if  by  nothing  else,  drew  attention  to  the  possible  reasons  for 
his  hostility  to  the  philosophy  of  the  mere  idea  and  the  merely 
supernatural. 

This  fact  suggests  the  nature  of  the  interest  the  mind  natu- 
rally takes  in  Schopenhauer.  We  are  first  alarmed  by  his 
utterances  about  his  predecessors  and  the  bold  realistic  char- 
acter of  his  own  first  principle ;  then  we  are  charmed  by  the 


24  Schopenhauer's  system. 

extraordinary  brilliance  and  richness  of  his  ntterances,  and 
strangely  interested  in  the  study  of  his  marvellous  personality, 
combining  as  it  does  to  a  more  wonderful  extent  than  that 
of  any  other  man  who  ever  lived  ^  the  power  for  abstract 
speculation  with  an  enormous  vitality  of  force  and  feeling ; 
and  then  finally  we  come  to  an  objective  study  of  the  man 
and  his  philosophy  as  a  great  natural  phenomenon  in  the  his- 
tory of  modern  culture. 

Schopenhauer's  own  personality  is  one  of  the  best  examples 
that  could  be  given  of  the  fact  that  the  primary  thing  about 
man  is  not  his  intellect  but  his  personality — his  endeavour, 
Goethe-like,  to  "  experience  "  all  things  and  to  obtain  the  fullest 
life  and  the  best  kind  of  happiness.  "  Ce  n'est  pas  un  philosophc 
covime  les  autres,"  said  some  one  of  him;  "c'cst  un  philosophc  qui 
a  vu  le  monde."  Schopenhauer  knew  his  character  perfectly 
well,  and  described  it  carefully  and  accurately ;  it  was  in  the 
language  of  psychology  about  one-half  choleric  and  one-half 
melancholic.  As  he  put  it,  he  belonged  to  the  ^vokoXoi  and 
not  to  the  tvKoXoi,  to  those  who  had  the  severe  or  difficult 
mood  of  life  and  not  to  those  who  had  the  easy  or  light  mood. 
The  reading  he  gave  of  life  was  therefore  a  stern  and  severe 
one. 

The  characterisation,  however,  of  Schopenhauer's  perception 
of  the  miseries  of  life,  as  a  direct  consequence  of  the  sensi- 
bility or  the  temperament  he  knew  himself  to  be  possessed 
of,  is  apt  to  become  superficial.  It  rests  upon  mere  truism. 
We  shall  be  occupied  throughout  not  with  the  man  and  the 
element  of  personal  equation  in  his  philosophy,  but  with  the 
question  of  the  grounds  upon  which  an  ultimate  judgment 
about  life  may  be  conceived  to  rest.  There  are  scores  of 
sentences  throughout  Schopenhauer  which  show  that  he  rose 
altogether  beyond  any  personal  estimate  of  life,  whether  his 

'  Gwinner  makes  out  Schopenhauer's  to  be  the  strongest  head  of  all  the 
philosophers. 


GEMERAL   ^VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's    SIGNIFICANCE.       25 

A  own  or  another's,  even  although  he  persisted  in  regarding  life 
in  tarms  of  feeling  and  action  rather  than  in  terms  of  know- 
ledge. "A  healthy  beggar  is  happier  than  a  sick  king,"  he 
insists.  '•  The  man  of  elevated  character  will  regard  men  in  a 
purely  objective  way,  and  not  according  to  the  relations  they 
sustain  to  his  own  personal  activity :  he  will  for  example  take 
cognisance  of  their  faults,  of  their  hate  even  and  injustice  to 
himself,  but  without  being  on  his  side  excited  to  hate  them ; 
be  will  be  able  to  look  on  their  good  fortunes  without  envying 
theni ;  he  will  recognise  their  good  qualities  without  wishing 
for  any  closer  relations  v.dth  them  ;  he  will  perceive  the  beauty 
of  women  without  being  drawn  to  them.  His  own  personal 
happiness  or  unhappiness  will  not  strongly  affect  him.  .  .  .  For 
he  will  see  in  his  own  course  of  life  and  its  misfortunes,  not  so 
nuicli  his  own  personal  lot  as  the  lot  of  humanity,  and  so  adopt 
the  attitude  more  of  a  spectator  than  a  sufferer."  ^ 

More  of  a  spectator  than  of  a  sufferer  !  These  words  are  char- 
acteristic of  the  being  we  have  yet  to  study  with  Schopenhauer, 
the  man  who  is  emancipated  from  wrong  views  and  feelings 
about  life.  But  what  is  the  meaning  of  Schopenhauer's  per- 
sistently pessimistic  estimate  of  life,  in  view  of  the  fact  that 
from  a  higher  standpoint  he  is  enabled  to  say,  "The  greatest 
thing  in  life  is  not  he  who  conquers  the  world  ( Welteroberer) 
but  he  who  overcomes  it  ( Wcltuberwinder) "  ?  '^  Are  we  to 
choose  the  standpoint  of  the  natural  man  or  the  emancipated 
man  in  drawing  up  our  estimate  of  life  ?  If  of  neither  but 
of  both,  then  what  are  we  to  say  the  world  is  as  a  matter  of 
fact  ?  What  is  to  be  our  dogmatic  position  about  the  world  as 
a  whole  ?  All  that  we  can  now  realise  is  that  perhaps  both 
the  dogmatism  of  pure  reason  and  the  dogmatism  of  pure 
passion  (naturalism)  are  apt  to  turn  out  to  be  one-sided 
estimates  of  life. 

I      Schopenhauer  was  always  enough  of  a  student  to  inquire, 

I  1  Die  Welt,  &c.,  Werke,  ii.  244.  2  cf_  pp.  49  ^nd  516. 


I 


26  SCHOPENHAUEll's   SYSTEM. 

in  the  order  of  ideas,  first  for  a  metapliysic  of  man  and  then 
for  an  etliic,  making  the  latter  to  depend  on  the  former, 
although  strangely  enough  his  personality  and  his  system 
teach  with  perfect  plainness  that  for  man  as  man  know- 
ledge does  not  precede  conduct,  but  conduct  knowledge.  The 
whole  enigma  of  his  philosophy,  and  the  whole  contradic- 
tion that  his  life  was,  depend  on  his  mental  effort  to  reconcile 
these  two  positions, — that  of  philosophy  which  says,  first  a 
metaphysic  or  theory  and  then  action,  and  that  of  nature 
which  says,  first  action  and  then  theory.  "  It  is  with  perfect 
right  that  the  heart,  this  primum  mobile  of  animal  life,  has 
been  chosen  and  designated  the  symbol  and  the  synonym  of 
the  will,  which  is  the  core  of  our  phenomenal  being,  and  this 
in  distinction  to  the  intellect,  which  is  exactly  just  the  same 
as  the  brain.  .  .  .  Heart  and  head  describe  the  whole  man. 
But  the  head  is  always  the  secondary  and  the  derivative ;  for 
it  is  not  the  centre  of  the  body  but  only  its  highest  efflorescence. 
When  a  hero  dies  it  is  his  heart  that  is  embalmed  and  not  his 
brain  ;  but  on  the  other  hand  people  are  willing  enough  to  pre- 
serve the  skull  of  poets  and  artists  and  philosophers."^  Else- 
where he  says  that  in  life  the  brain  and  the  heart  get  "  more 
a7id  more  detached  from  each  other "  as  life  goes  on.  This,  as 
it  stands,  is  an  exaggerated  assertion ;  the  opposite  in  fact  is 
nearer  the  truth,  because  as  people  grow  older  a  harmony 
generally  seems  to  establish  itself  betweer  their  conscious 
desires  and  their  unconscious  actions,  between  what  they  know 
and  what  they  feel.  It  is  chiefly  only  in  the  young,  and  in 
people  of  unstable  character,  that  reason  and  instinct  do  not 
seem  to  be  in  perfect  accord.  Schopenhauer  of  course  be- 
lieved that  we  could  attain  to  full  salvation  from  human 
misery  only  by  giving  up  willing  and  acting  altogether,  and 
by  taking  refuge  in  the  higher  kind  of  knowledge  (artistic 
and  religious  contemplation),  which  is  as  far  removed  from 

^  Die  Welt,  &c.,  ii.  267,  268,  passim. 


GENERAL    VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER'S   SIGNIFICANCE.       27 

willing  and  acting  (from  the  heart  therefore)  as  possible.  To 
correlate,  however,  in  our  thought  the  workings  of  the  head  and 
the  heart  is  the  great  problem  in  Schopenhauer.  Tiie  diffi- 
culty really  is  :  if  philosophy  has  systematically  put  knowledge 
before  conduct,  while  nature  has  done  the  reverse,  what  is  to 
become  of  philosophy  ?  If  nature  is  really  our  teacher,  what 
about  reason,  and  rational  thinking  concerning  the  end  of  life  ? 

Schopenhauer  in  early  life  insisted  (he  was  set  a-thinking 
by  Gall  and  the  philosophical  physiology  of  the  day)  on  a 
belief  in  two  things :  heredity  and  the  practical  identity  of 
mind  and  body.  He  can  hardly  be  made  out  to  have  fully 
understood  the  physiology  and  the  psychology  of  heredity. 
Nor  did  he  work  out  to  any  degree  of  completeness  the 
relation  of  the  fact  of  heredity  to  the  question  of  moral 
freedom.  But  he  always  insisted  that  action  was  the  result 
of  two  factors,  character  and  circumstances  or  environment.  It 
is  an  essential  part  of  his  doctrine  that  we  cannot  speak  of  a 
causal  relation  between  a  man's  will  and  his  bodily  acts,  as  if 
the  will  were  a  thing  by  itself.  It  is  really  wrong,  he  thinks, 
to  distinguish  the  will  from  actions  :  "  will "  is  an  established 
tendency  to  action,  and  is,  in  fact,  the  sum-total  of  actions,  the 
organic  or  total  self.  To  the  idea  of  the  identity  of  mind  and 
body,  Schopenhauer  may  be  said  to  have  held  quite  rigidly,  if 
not  always  with  perfect  consistency,  really  believing,  and  say- 
ing a  score  of  times,  that  the  notion  of  an  independent  soul 
was  a  positive  hindrance  and  bugbear  in  the  way  of  a  truly 
scientific  psychology.  "There  is  no  soul,"  he  wrote  in  a 
burst  of  enthusiasm  after  hearing  Gall  at  Hamburg,  "  and  no 
psychology:  brain  and  bodily  processes  explain  all  that  we 
call  mental."  Throughout  his  philosophy  the  organic  body  is 
simply  "  will "  objectified,  each  particular  volition  having  its 
particular  organ  or  organs,  the  teeth  and  stomach  being  objec- 
tified hunger,  the  feet  objectified  haste,  and  so  on. 


I 


28  Schopenhauer's  system. 

We  shall  later  encounter  the  issues  at  stake  between  the 
metaphysician,  who  objects  to  the  intrusion  into  metaphysic 
of  psychological  ideas  and  categories,  and  the  psychologist,  who 
objects  to  the  intrusion  into  psychology  of  metaphysical  ideas 
and  categories.  We  may  learn  from  the  facts  which  Schopen- 
hauer's study  of  the  human  personality  reveals,  that  neither 
the  Cartesian  nor  the  Kantian  dualist,  nor  the  Spinozistic  nor 
tlie  Hegelian  monist,  can  be  regarded  as  having  set  forth  in  a 
complete  or  actual  way  the  relation  of  the  mind  to  the  body.^ 

It  is  needless  here  to  enumerate  and  discuss  the  natural- 
istic philosophers  whom  Schopenhauer  studied.  Cabanis, 
Helvetius,  and  Diderot,  and  (later  in  his  life)  Burdach  and 
Bichat,  were  some  of  the  chief.  His  system  got  from  this 
source  its  scientific  aspect,  which  is  another  great  reason 
for  its  modern  interest.  It  moves  all  the  time  on  tliat 
dismal  fighting-ground,  the  border-land  of  religion  (or  philo- 
sophy) and  science.  The  special  problem  of  philosophy  to 
him  was  to  "  unite  the  cosmical  and  the  ethical  order,"  to 
find  "  in  nature  a  basis  for  man's  conduct,"  and  he  believed 
that  his  principle  of  will  gave  the  human  mind  what  it 
wanted.  It  was  his  special  boast  that  he  "  united,  as  no  one 
else  had  done,  Thales  and  Socrates,"  the  philosophy  of  nature 
and  that  of  man,  and  this  not  by  starting  either  from  the 
subject  or  the  object,  as  former  systems  had  done.  All  other 
systems,  he  thought,  had  tried  to  explain  the  subject  from 
the  object  or  the  object  from  the  subject  by  the  principle  of 
causation  or  sufficient  reason,  forgetting  that  such  principles 
applied  only  to  things  as  phenomena. 

By  placing  the  reality  of  human  personality  in  will  or  in 

^  As  a  metaphysiciau  Schopenhauer  objects  to  the  introduction  of  the  psycho- 
logical notion  of  an  individual  (empirical)  self  into  the  metaphysic  of  the  will. 
See,  e.g.,  p.  395.  From  the  point  of  view  of  psychology,  however,  we  might  object 
to  Schopenhauer's  seeming  (see  chap,  iii.)  to  think  that  the  self  (or  the  will)  is 
actually  irrational  (blind,  unconscious,  &c.),  because  it  is  difficult  to  comprehend 
or  understand  the  self.  ,        .        / 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       29 

functional  activity,  Schopenhauer  certainly  puts  himself  in 
line  with  the  teaching  of  evolution  about  man,  both  as  to  his 
past  history  and  his  possible  destiny  in  the  future.  Physical 
evolution  seems  to  teach  that  man  has  attained  to  his  present 
position  in  the  scale  of  being  by  boundless  atruggle  and  war- 
fare ;  and  that  nature  puts  each  individual  at  its  start  in  life 
upon  the  vantage-ground  fought  out  for  it  by  all  its  pre- 
decessors, and  gives  it  an  organism  whose  unconscious  ten- 
dencit'S,  instincts,  and  impulses  chronicle  the  laborious  and 
largely  conscious  efforts  of  all  its  predecessors  to  conform  to 
their  environment  and  to  attain  the  maximum  of  life  both 
as  to  quality  and  to  quantity.  And  as  far  as  the  future  goes 
there  does  seem  to  be  more  hope  for  the  individual  if  the 
reality  of  his  being  is  placed  essentially  in  volition  rather 
than  in  knowledge.  Knowledge  is  not  an  end  in  itself. 
And  further  it  is  essentially  impersonal  in  its  nature.  The 
Averroists  saw  this  when  they  professed  to  find  in  mere 
knowledge  no  sufficient  ground  for  immortality ;  and  Hegel's 
"  Idea "  too  is  essentially  impersonal  in  its  nature.  But  to 
null  endlessly  means  to  aspire  endlessly,  and  if  there  is  pro- 
vision anywhere  in  the  system  of  things  for  giving  to  man 
that  which  would  not  merely  satisfy  his  intellect  but  also 
lift  him  on  to  a  higher  stage  of  life,  we  may  then  think  of 
immortality  as  something  that  may  fall  to  the  lot  of  the 
individual  who  supremely  desires  it,  and  is  supremely  worthy 
of  it. 

Another  noticeable. effect  of  Schopenhauer's  study  of  physi- 
cal and  natural  science  was  his  acceptance  of  the  doctrine  of 
Malebranche  that  all  causes  are  occasional  causes.  "  Male- 
branche  is  right  in  his  theory  of  occasional  causes  (causes  occtt' 
sioncllcs)."  This  means  that  Schopenhauer  held  that  the  causal 
explanation  of  things,  or  ajtiology,  as  he  calls  it  (from  alria,  a 
cause),  was  simply  the  referring  of  one  phenomenon  to  another 


30  Schopenhauer's  system. 

phenomenon,  and  that  therefore  causal  explanation  was  only 
partial  explanation,  valuable  enough  for  the  understanding  of 
man  who  preserves  his  life  by  unravelling  somehow  the  con- 
nections among  things,  but  of  no  ultimate  significance.  "  The 
setiological  explanation  of  things  does  nothing  more  than  dis- 
cover the  natural  laws  according  to  which  circumstances 
happen  in  time  and  space,  showing  for  all  cases  what  pheno- 
mena must  necessarily  appear  just  at  that  time  and  in  that 
place.  .  .  .  But  about  the  inner  nature  of  any  single  pheno- 
menon whatever  we  do  not  in  this  way  attain  to  even  the 
slightest  decision."  ^  A  phenomenon  is  only  completely  ex- 
plained, that  is,  by  being  assigned  to  its  systematic  place  in 
the  universe  of  which  it  forms  a  part ;  and  as  we  can  at  best 
do  this  but  partially,  all  causal  explanation  is  in  a  sense  in- 
adequate and  fortuitous,  resting  simply  on  our  perception  of 
the  amount  of  reality  which  we  at  any  one  time  happen  to 
know.  Of  the  world  as  a  whole  there  is  no  explanation,  and 
to  ask  for  a  cause  of  the  universe  is  unmeaning ;  we  can  only 
try  to  say  what  the  world  is  and  how  things  in  it  have  be- 
come what  they  are,  not  liow  the  world  itself  has  become 
what  it  is.  "  The  absolute  cannot  be  thought  of  as  a  first 
cause,  for  the  simple  reason  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as 
a  first  cause."  "  Equally  little  can  it  be  thought  of  as  the 
absolutely  necessary,  because  necessity  only  means  being  so 
and  so  for  certain  grounds,  .  .  .  and  so  the  absolutely 
necessary  is  a  contradictio  in  adjccto."'^ 

Thus  Schopenhauer  holds  with  many  other  profound  thinkers 
that  scientific  knowledge  only  serves  to  stave  off  our  ignorance, 
and  that  it  seems  from  the  standpoint  of  science  extremely 
doubtful  whether  there  can  indeed  ever  be  such  a  thing  as 
absolute  or  final  knov/ledge.  There  may  be,  and  there  is,  a 
philosophy  of  nature  in  addition  to  mere  retiology  (or  scientific 

1  Die  Welt,  &c.,  Werke,  ii.  116. 
'    "  ly.  d.  Universitiits-Philosophie,  Werke,  v.  199.  ' 


GENERAL   VIEW   OP   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      31 

causal  t!xplanation),  but  what  this  philosophy  is,  is  utterly  in- 
conceivable from  the  point  of  view  of  mere  mechanical  causa- 
tion, which  is  all  that  science  has  to  do  with.  The  real  value 
of  this  idea  seems  to  lie  just  in  the  very  fact  of  its  suggesting 
that  metaphysical  knowledge  must  be  something  quite  different 
from  scientific  knowledge.  Metaphysical  knowledge  cannot 
consist  in  knowledge  merely  of  causes  and  of  entities.  Schop- 
enhauer practically  teaches  us  that  the  key  to  the  unity  of  a 
thing  lies  in  the  fact  of  its  function^  whether  that  is  merely 
mechanical  or  to  a  certain  extent  organic.  This  is  what  his 
notion  of  will  means.  A  philosophy  of  mere  forces  or  causes 
only  expresses  the  relation  of  the  movement  of  some  things 
to  the  movement  of  some  other  things.  My  body  or  the  earth 
may  be  taken  as  a  point  of  reference  to  which  the  movement 
of  all  other  things  is  referred,  but  then  it  is  at  once  apparent 
that  the  earth  itself  is  in  movement,  and  so  is  the  sun  in 
reference  to  other  bodies,  and  so  on  ad  infinitum.  The  saying 
of  Archimedes,  "  Give  me  a  fulcrum  and  I  will  move  the 
world,"  is  truly  the  rcductio  ad  ahsurdum  of  a  mechanical 
philosophy,  for  every  point  in  the  universe  is  really  a  point 
of  reference  in  relation  to  which  all  the  other  things  in  the 
universe  may  be  conceived  to  be  in  motion.  A  point  to 
which  all  mere  motion  could  be  referred  is  strictly  speaking 
an  imaginary  point.  A  merely  retiological  or  mechanical  philo- 
sophy simply  takes  us  from  one  cause  to  another  antecedent 
cause,  and  so  on  ad  infinitum.  "  Or,  if  I  may  use  an  absurd 
but  more  striking  comparison,  the  philosophical  investigator 
must  always  have  the  same  feeling  towards  the  complete 
aetiology  of  the  whole  of  nature  as  a  man  who,  without 
knowing  how,  has  been  brought  into  a  company  quite  un- 
known to  him,  each  member  of  which  in  turn  presents  another 
to  him  as  his  friend  and  his  cousin,  and  therefore  as  quite 
well  known,  and  yet  the  man  himself,  while  at  each  introduc- 
tion he  expresses  himself  gratified,  has  always  the  question 


32  Schopenhauer's  system. 

on  his  lips,  '  But  how   the  deuce  do  I  stand  to  the  whole 
company  ? '" ^ 

Then  as  to  atoms  and  cells  and  monads  and  organisms, — the 
outcome  of  Schopenhauer's  thought  virtually  is  that  only  such 
organisms  as  seem  to  exist  for  themselves  can  be  regarded  as 
absolutely  existing  at  all.  All  things  move,  and  all  animals  to 
a  certain  extent  may  be  said  to  vnll,  but  none  of  them  attain 
anything  for  tliemselves.  It  is  only  man  who  seems  to  attain 
to  something  in  his  volition,  to  something  for  himself.  Persons 
therefore  are  in  a  sense  the  only  real  existences,  or  at  least  all 
other  organic  beings  are  beings  inferior  to  conscious  persons. 
A  conscious  person  is  the  highest  outcome  of  nature.  Schopen- 
hauer naturally  regarded  the  universe  itself  as  th§  sole  ulti- 
mate reality,  and  even  the  universe  in  his  eyes  is  always  as  it 
were  running  away  from  itself,  because  volition  to  him  means 
continually  going  out  of  self  without  ever  returning  to  the 
self  in  any  valid  sense  of  the  word.  Metaphysical  know- 
ledge, however,  has  as  little  to  do  with  mere  entities  as-  with 
mere  causes.  Any  ordinary  phenomenon  "  will  do  for  "  a  cause, 
and  anything,  broadly  speaking,  is  an  "entity"  or  a  sum 
of  entities.  Scieutiuu  knowledge  in  itself  is  not  a  search  for 
final  causes ;  it  only  enables  us  to  explain  one  thing  by  refer- 
ence to  some  other  thing,  or  to  some  of  its  antecedents  or 
some  of  its  consequents.  Only  the  ends  or  aims  of  conscious 
persons  give  us  points  of  view  for  systematising  the  universe. 
Metaphysics  therefore  has  to  do  with  the  ends  or  aims  of  con- 
scious persons.  After  the  scientific  philosophy  of  the  century 
we  are  coming  to  see  that  metaphysical  knowledge  is  quali- 
tatively different  from  scientific  knowledge  ;  it  "  goes  beyond " 
mere  physical  knovv  ledge  as  the  name  itself  implies.  It  ought 
to  start,  in  short,  with  what  has  been  called  the  sumvuun 
honum,  the  highest  good  for  man.  All  this  arises  by  way  of 
natural  consequence  from  holding  will  to  be  the  only  ultimate 

1  Die  Welt,  &c.,  Werke,  ii.  117  ;  H.  and  K.'s  transl.,  i.  127. 


OENERAL   VIEW   OP   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       33 

reality,  seeing  that  will  at  its  highest  stage  simply  means,  in 
the  first  instance,  our  volition. 

Schopenhauer  had  the  scientific  tendency  to  try  to  see 
all  things  reduced  to  their  naturalia  or  simplest  natural  ele- 
merts ;  inorganic  objects  to  atoms  which  attracted  and  repelled 
each  other,  and  organic  objects  to  the  play  of  their  fundamental 
organs.  His  supreme  principle,  will,  is  not  will  of  the  highest 
type,  the  rational  self-determining  will  of  the  philosophers, — 
he  believed  that  to  be  a  hitherto  unchallenged  fiction,  and 
it  certainly  is  an  extremely  misleading  phrase, — but  will  of 
the  lowest  type,  impulse  or  instinct,  the  will  which  is  more 
perfectly  exemplified  in  animals  than  in  man.  This  was  so 
because  Schopenhauer  was  not  himself  free  from  the  scientific 
conception  of  philosophy  that  we  have  just  referred  to,  the 
tendency,  namely,  to  regard  the  last  elements  of  things,  the 
piKiofictTu  wavTiov,  in  the  language  of  Empedocles,  as  something 
beneath  or  prior  to  the  existence  of  conscious  persons.  He 
had  tliis  tendency  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  accepted  the 
teaching  of  Berkeley  and  Kant  about  the  "  object "  being 
dependent  upon  the  "  subject,"  about  there  being  no  world 
apart  from  consciousness  or  thought.  Now  if  the  essence  of 
all  things  is  will,  the  entities  or  things  lower  down  in  nature 
than  human  personality  are  not  strictly  speaking  things  in 
themselves  at  all,  things  that  have  an  absolute  existence  apart 
from  other  things.  Matter  without  form  is  nothing,  and 
formed  matter  has  significance  only  in  relation  to  conscious 
persons.     '  ■ '  ■.  -  ^ 

If  Schopenhauer  had  not  been  influenced  by  the  idea  that 
metaphysic  or  philosophy  enables  us  in  some  way  to  speak 
about  the  simplest  elements  of  organic  as  well  ap  of  physical 
matter,  he  would  not  have  taken  as  his  type  of  will  the  lowest 
phase  of  volition,  animal  instinct.  We  may,  of  course,  learn 
to  a  certain  extent  what  the  higher  phases  of  volition  are  from 
u  study  of  the  lower  phases,  just  as  we  learn  much  about 

c 


34  Schopenhauer's  system. 

organic  nature  from  the  study  of  inorganic  nature.  Indeed 
the  study  of  instinct  leads  the  mind  naturally  onwards  to  a 
study  of  reason  and  reasoned  action.  Nature  can  be  under- 
stood only  by  reference  to  man,  and  instinct  can  be  under- 
stood only  by  reference  to  its  highest  development  in  human 
volition.  Schopenhauer  thus  put  philosophy  upon  the  patli 
best  calculated  to  yield  a  full  understanding  of  man's  nature. 
Kant  had  suggested  that  in  the  will  of  man  was  to  be  found 
somehow  the  key  to  the  nature  of  things.  But  because  the 
ethical  reconstruction  which  he  attempted  in  the  '  Criticism 
of  Practical  Keason  '  seemed  to  be  something  which  he  was 
not  theoretically  entitled  to  make,  the  philosophical  world 
could  not  take  the  hint  for  what  it  was  really  worth. 

Schopenhauer's  writings  further  exhibit  the  bluff  realistic 
way  of  talking  about  man's  life  characteristic  of  the  anatomy- 
room.  His  language  largely  corresponds  to  his  conviction 
that  all  human  beliefs  and  feelings  can  be  systematised  under 
the  idea  of  the  continuance  and  furtherance  of  the  life  of  the 
world- will.  He  saw  that  normal  mental  life  included  the 
normal  play  of  man's  thousand  and  one  organic  activities, 
and  that  man's  activity  is  so  organised  that,  in  studying 
it  even  from  one  point  of  view,  one  implicitly  appeals  to 
the  total  activity  of  which  the  one  side  in  question  is  only  an 
aspect.  He  felt  convinced  that  man,  as  a  natural  organism 
or  living  being,  could  claim  no  exemption  from  the  so-called 
laws  of  animate  nature  as  to  birth  and  maturity  and  decay, 
although  he  certainly  would  not  have  been  rash  enough  to 
hold  that  man  can  think  a  transitory  existence  to  be  his 
only  existence.  We  shall  have  to  consider  how  far  we  can 
agree  with  him  that  the  mere  reason  of  man  cannot  be  said 
to  guarant'ie  for  man  a  more  than  phenomenal  or  transitional 
existence.^  There  had  been  an  understanding  among  philo- 
sophers of  his  own  day  that,  as  Novalis  said,  while  philosophy 
'  Cf.  chap.  viii. ;  also  p.  464,  &c. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER'S   SIGNIFICANCE.      35 

"could  bake  no  bread,"  she  could  yet  procure  for  us  "God 
and  freedom  and  immortality  " ;  but  Schopenhauer,  like  von 
Hartraann,  ridicules  the  idea  of  any  serious  mind  coming  to 
philosophy  with  any  expectation  whatever  about  what  it  could 
possibly  do.  It  is  well  known  that  as  a  young  man  he  him- 
self came  to  the  study  of  the  world  with  none  of  the  tra- 
ditional beliefs  and  spiritual  inheritances  common  to  the  youth 
of  Germany  in  his  day.  This  is  seen  in  his  perfectly  in- 
genuous willingness  to  accept  completely  any  statement  about 
the  ultimate  elements  of  man's  life,  which  purported  to  be 
matter  of  fact ;  he  was  a  physical  realist  from  beginning  to 
end  of  his  thinking.  One  must  be  careful,  too,  when  stating 
tlie  results  of  his  speculations  in  the  stereotyped  phraseology 
either  of  philosophy  or  theology  to  remember  not  only  that 
Schopenhauer  himself  made  little  serious  attempt  to  correlate 
his  own  thought  with  any  other  system  in  existence  (save 
perhaps  the  Kantian  philosophy),  but  that  he  did  not  care 
in  the  least  to  be  understood.  The  majority  of  men  were  a 
mere  profanum  vulgus  in  his  eyes,  a  servile  pectis  at  once  too 
ignorant  and  too  sordid  to  care  for  fundamental  knowledge, 
especially  such  fundamental  knowledge  as  failed  to  justify 
established  beliefs  and  customs,  prejudice  and  practice.  He 
had,  too,  the  effrontery  or  the  courage  ("  si  omnes  patrcs  sic, 
at  ego  non  sic")  to  believe  that  he  wrote  more  for  posterity 
than  for  contemporaries.  And  he  really  wrote  about  the 
"  natural  man  "  for  "  all  time,"  saying  perhaps  the  last  word 
on  that  subject  in  philosophy. 

Schopenhauer  may  be  said  to  make  people  believe  that  the 
world  is  worse  than  they  had  taken  it  to  be,  rather  than  to 
make  them  feel  that  it  can  be  reconciled  with  their  highest 
desires,  and  this  sense  of  disenchantment  makes  his  system 
] 'leasing  to  the  sour  or  morbid  or  sceptical  mind.  "  Philo- 
sophy is  no  church  and  no  religion.     It  represents  that  small 


36  Schopenhauer's  system.  ' 

spot  on  the  earth's  surface,  accessible  only  to  the  veriest  few, 
where  truth,  that  is  everywhere  hated  and  persecuted,  is  for 
once  unwedded  to  any  pressure  and  compulsion."  In  the 
very  connection  in  which  we  are  speaking,  it  is  right  to  say 
that  Schopenhauer  gives  man  an  impersonal  immortality  in 
impersonal  will  just  as  the  Averroists  gave  him  an  impersonal 
immortality  in  impersonal  reason ;  but  one  must  never  think 
that  this  statement  (which  is  in  its  very  nature  a  concession) 
at  all  represents  the  spirit  of  a  philosophy  whose  essence  is 
to  make  no  concessions  to  any  mind.  Not  that  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  is  purely  positive  in  tone,  or  that  his  mind  was 
indeed  rationally  free  in  the  complete  sense,  but  that  his 
philosophy  is  a  most  serious  and  most  honest  attempt  of 
what  some  people  like  to  call  the  natural  unassisted  reason 
of  man  to  solve  the  mystery  of  the  world,  without  making 
compromises  with  existing  philosophy  or  religion.  The  on- 
tology of  Schopenhauer  is  certainly  more  a  cosmology  than 
a  theology,  for  he  is  primarily  in  search  of  a  doctrine  con- 
taining some  statement  as  to  the  last  elements  of  the  natural 
world.  Only  we  must  remember  that  the  very  expression 
the  "  natural  world "  has  come  to  be  used  as  antithetical  to 
something  else  (a  spiritual  world),  although  there  is  no  real 
warrant  for  attaching  any  such  limited  signification  to  it. 
Schopenhauer  is  one  of  those  to  whom  the  natural  is  also 
supernatural,^  and  it  is  really  the  outcome  of  his  doctrine  that 
we  must  give  up  the  search  for  an  ontology  and  content  our- 
selves with  a  teleology — not  the  teleology  of  a  Paley  or  a  Kant, 
but  simply  a  practical  philosophy  or  a  philosophy  of  action. 

Strictly  speaking,  the  teaching  of  Schopenhauer  closes  with 
a  negative  solution  of  the  problem  of  the  nature  of  reality. 
He  indeed  maintains  that  the  world  is  will,  and  will  means 
for  him  force  or  impulse ;  but  he  still  conceives  of  will  in 

-  ^  Cf.  the  reference  to  J.  S.  Mill  on  p.  23.         „ .:..  _ 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUEr's    SIGNIFICANCE.      37 

primarily  a  negative  way.  He  comes  in  the  end  to  tell  us 
what  the  world  is  not,  and  what  the  end  of  life  is  not.  The 
closing  sentences  of  his  chief  work  are  to  the  effect  that  this 
world,  with  all  its  "  suns  and  milky  ways,  is  really  nothing," 
and  that  "  before  us  there  is  certainly  only  nothingness."  All 
that  seemingly  exists  is  in  his  view  only  illusory  appearance. 
The  reason  for  this  has  already  been  suggested.  In  saying 
that  all  things  are  will  he  had  in  his  mind's  eye  the  form  of 
activity  that  we  call  instinct,  and  not  volition  in  the  highest 
sense  of  conscious  purpose.  A  being  that  merely  acts  in 
accordance  with  instinct  is  no  being  at  all  in  the  highest 
sense ;  it  does  not  know  what  it  is  doing  or  what  it  is 
realising.  Schopenhauer  thought  of  the  world-will  as  largely 
instinctive  ami  automatic  (chiefly  because  that  was  what 
seemed  to  strike  him  in  the  biological  way  of  looking  at 
man),  and  therefore  nugatory ;  it  did  not  really  know  what  it 
realised.  A  being  that  wills  consciously  is  of  course  more 
real  through  its  volition,  because  in  its  volition  it  knows  that 
it  attains  to  something  which  at  one  time  it  had  not.  But 
Schopenhauer  did  not  seo  this  truth  or  did  not  grasp  its 
significance.  It  is  perhaps  better  to  say  that  he  did  not  grasp 
its  significance.  He  maintains  that  the  very  idea  which  con- 
scious beings  have  of  realising  certain  ends  is  an  illusion : 
men  do  not  realise  that  which  they  think  they  realise.  And 
liis  teaching  must  be  examined  seriously,  for  the  reason  that 
he  does  at  least  show  what  men  do  not  realise — namely, 
individual  happiness  or  pleasure. 

Though  Schopenhauer's  system  has  a  strong  materialistic 
colouring  it .  is  not  materialism.  It  is  rather  animism  or 
])anpsychism  (pa7ithelism,  in  point  of  fact).  His  theory  of 
life  is  essentially  metaphysical :  living  beings  are  individua- 
tions of  the  will  to  live,  the  principles  of  individuation  being 


38  Schopenhauer's  SYSTEM.      :  ^ 

space  and  time.^  Genus  or  species  is  to  him  at  bottom  a 
mere  conceptual  idea  having  no  real  existence ;  there  are  no 
such  things,  that  is,  as  groups  of  beings  definitely  marked 
off  in  space  and  time  from  other  beings  which  we  might  call 
genera  or  species.  Different  species  are  mere  variable  and 
varying  objectifications  of  the  one  will-to-live.^  And  just 
as  in  modern  biology  it  is  difficult  to  say  where  the  individu- 
ality of  an  organism  begins,  since  all  organisms  are  sums 
of  organic  units,  each  of  which  may  in  a  sense  be  said  to 
have  individuality,  and  since,  further,  individuality  is  often  a 
transitional  phenomenon  (as  in  animals  that  are  groups  of 
animals),  so  in  Schopenhauer  there  is  no  discontinuity  between 
one  organism  and  another,  and  between  all  apparent  organ- 
isms and  the  will  of  the  world.  Individuality  is  there  only 
a  form  of  the  present,  like  the  imaginary  point  where  the 
rainbow  rests  on  the  particles  of  water  that  fall  down  a 
cataract.  "  The  life  of  the  individual  is  not  enough  for  me," 
says  the  will,  according  to  Schopenhauer.  "  I  need  the  life 
of  the  species  to  endless  time,  for  endless  time  is  the  form  of 
my  appearance."  "  All  life  is  nothing  but  a  continual  change 
of  matter  under  the  steady  persistence  of  form ;  this  is  what 
we  mean  by  the  transitoriness  of  the  individual  in  the  eternity 
of  the  species."  Most  thinkers  are  now  prepared  to  admit 
that  conscious  existence  for  self  or  conscious  personality  isj 
something  that  we  do  not  find  lower  down  in  the  biological  I 
scale  than  man.  ("  Sticks  and  stones  "  are  hardly  individuals 
or  organic  units  at  all ;  there  is  no  question  about  their  being 
final  existences  :  they  simply  are  not  such.)     But  just  because 

^  It  must  be  difficult  for  the  average  reader  to  grasp  what  Schopenhauer  | 
means  by  ohjcctification  and  particularisation  and  individuation.     These  expres- 
sions refer  to  his  theory  of  the  origin  of  the  world  of  particular  things  and  I 
persons.     In  itself  the  will  has  neither  individuality  nor  personality ;  these  are 
merely  forma  that  it  seems  to  our  intellect  to  assume  when  it  becomes  the  ohjtd 
of  our  perception. 


GENERAL   VIEW    OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       39 

Schopenhauer,  although  in  other  respects  a  metaphysician  (as 
to  the  external  world  depending  upon  our  consciousness,  for 
example),  looked,  as  do  most  biologists,  more  at  the  instinc- 
tive and  the  automatic  in  man  than  at  the  conscious  and 
deliberate,  he  did  not  see  the  full  significance  of  the  fact  of 
conscious  individuality  in  man.  Man  seemed  to  him  a  crea- 
ture led  and  dominated  by  his  instincts,  and  therefore  a  mere 
puppet  in  the  hands  of  nature.  Society  too  is  to  him  at  once 
the  fiction  that  it  is  to  the  anarchist,  and  the  questionable 
entity  that  it  is  to  the  biologist.  Take  away  the  bolts  and 
the  chains  which  confine  men,  he  suggests,  and  you  will  soon 
see,  as  in  revolution  and  in  anarchy,  what  beasts  men  really 
are.  A  nation  or  a  people,  he  thinks,  is  nothing ;  it  is  only 
tlie  individuals  therein  that  are  real,  and  their  existence  is 
but  of  the  moment. 

We  can  appreciate  the  full  force  of  these  thoughts  only 
when  we  come  to  study  Schopenhauer's  teaching  about  the 
"  empirical  character "  and  the  evil  or  wayward  and  selfish 
will  of  the  individual.^  All  things  to  Schopenhauer  are  ob- 
jectifications  or  external  manifestations  of  the  will, — a  highly 
metaphysical  idea,  the  possible,  sober,  actual  meaning  of 
which  we  shall  soon  examine.  Still  for  "  the  materialists  " 
(Schopenhauer  has  boundless  contempt,  the  fellows  with  "  no 
liuraanities,  no  culture,  nothing  but  their  syringe-ology  and 
instruments."  There  is  perhaps  no  philosopher  to  whom  one 
could  more  easily  refer  a  student  offhand  for  a  refutation  of 
materialism  than  Schopenhauer.  He  sees  in  a  nutshell  the 
whole  absurdity  of  trying  to  evolve  a  "  subject "  from  an 
"  object "  which  really  presupposes  an  existing  subject  to  start 
with.  He  accepts,  as  we  shall  see,^  the  Berkeleyan- Kantian 
analysis  of  the  real  in  this  regard.  Materialism,  as  he  says, 
always  fills  him  with  the  "  Olympian  laughter  of  the  gods." 

^  Cf ■  chaps,  iv.  and  viii.  ^  In  chap.  ii. 


40  Schopenhauer's  system. 

If  Schopenhauer  himself  is  not  always,  as  he  thinks  he  is, 
on  Olympus,  he  is  certainly  the  giant  trying  to  scale  it. 

It  is  often  asked  whether  Schopenhauer  was  really  a  care- 
ful student  of  science.  In  the  first  place  Schopenhauer's 
habits  of  mind,  as  has  been  remarked,  were  not  those  of  the 
ordinary  systematic  investigator  or  strict  thinker.  He  jotted 
down  his  thoughts  not  in  a  systematic  order  but  aphoristic- 
ally,  just  as  ideas  struck  him,  about  things  he  saw  or  read. 
As  Goethe  has  been  called  a  Gclegenheitsdichtcr,  so  Schopen- 
hauer has  been  called  a  Gclcgc7ilicitsphilosoph ;  he  philosophises 
about  life  as  a  whole,  but  also  about  all  the  facts  of  life  as  they 
come  before  him.  And  what  he  had  thus  from  time  to  time 
become  convinced  of  or  had  seemed  to  perceive,  he  afterwards 
worked  up  in  the  study  into  some  whole  or  system.  The 
days  of  his  devotion  to  science,  again,  were  the  days  when 
science  was  not  yet  emancipated  from  NaturpMlosopMc — the 
construction  of  nature  under  some  theoretically  conceived 
first  principle — when  mechanical  physics  was  giving  place  to 
speculative  biology.     His  own  philosophy  is  still  a  cosmogony. 

Schopenhauer's  conception  of  intelligence  led  him  to  be- 
lieve in  an  intuitive  perception  of  truth  rather  than  in  a 
reasoned  apprehension  of  it.  He  would  have  approved  of  the 
"  intdlechts  sihi  permissus  "  of  Bacon,  and  his  whole  philosophy 
rests  on  a  hypothetical  construction  of  the  world,  indicating 
undoubtedly  a  "  leap  "  of  the  mind  of  man  somehow  beyond 
appearances  into  the  core  of  reality,  an  attempt  to  say  by 
way  of  speculation  and  "insight"  what  the  physical  world 
is.  But  though  a  cosmogonist,  Schopenhauer  never  tried  to 
think  as  exactly  as  even  Lucretius,  for  example,  did,  about 
the  way  in  which  the  apparent  order  of  the  world  was 
maintained ;  nor  did  he  know  anything  like  the  amount  of 
physical  science  that  Kant  did.  He  approved  of  a  quick  per- 
ceptual divination  of  the  meaning  of  nature,  and  speaks  with 


GENERAL   VIEW  OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      41 

admiration  of  all  scientific  discoveries  which  seem  to  have 
been  made  by  a  happy  blending  of  the  perceptual  and  re- 
flective powers  on  the  part  of  the  investigator.  He  speaks 
of  Hooke  and  Newton  and  Lavoisier  and  Goethe  in  this 
regard,  and  his  immediate  friends  and  disciples  have  com- 
pared him — on  the  strength  of  some  direct  and  indirect  con- 
fession and  contention  on  his  part — to  Lavoisier,  as  a  sort  of 
Lavoisier-philosopher  who  tried  to  simplify  the  various  ele- 
ments of  the  metaphysical  philosophers.  He  compared  the 
effort  to  understand  the  world  with  the  attempt  to  read  a 
manuscript  written  in  a  language  the  alphabet  of  which  one 
does  not  know. 

It  must  be  admitted  that  this  feeling  which  one  has  in 
reading  Schopenhauer  of  a  purely  hypothetical  instead  of  a 
scientific  and  verifiable  construction  of  things,  is  not  nearly 
so  strong  as  in  the  case  of  von  Hartmann,  and  also  that 
Schopenhauer  believed  himself  to  have  verified  by  the  studies 
of  thirty  years  his  early  conceived  scheme  of  the  world  as  an 
olijectification  of  will.  Still  there  is  in  him  no  complete  and 
vigorous  application  of  the  inductive  method  which  Bacon 
emphasised  so  strongly.  There  are  a  hundred  gates  to  his 
system,  he  thinks,  all  leading  to  the  central  citadel  of  the 
will  as  the  sole  reality  of  things — which  idea  is  also  a  fact 
of  observation,  he  would  add.  This  professed  coincidence  of 
indirect  and  direct  proof  is  Schopenhauer's  real  position  about 
his  logical  method.  Just  as  animals  by  a  kind  of  clairvoy- 
ance divine  the  ends  which  nature  intends  them  to  follow,  so 
— he  holds — through  a  kind  of  apergu  or  intuitive  divination 
does  man  obtain  his  deepest  knowledge  of  the  secret  work- 
ings of  nature.  The  intuitions  of  genius  into  nature  surpass 
indeed  in  process  and  result  the  analytic  method  of  the  mere 
scientist,  although  in  the  end  the  method  of  genius  and  phil- 
osophy and  the  method  of  science  and  observation  ought  to 
lead  to  the  same  results. 


42  Schopenhauer's  system. 

It  is  somewhat  difficult  to  allow  for  the  various  kinds  of 
intuition  that  Schopenhauer  supposes  man  to  have.  There 
are  the  intuitions  of  sense-perception,  as  to  which  Schopen- 
hauer is  essentially  Kantian  in  his  ideas,  maintaining  that 
such  intuitions  imply  the  machinery  of  the  understanding. 
Then  he  sometimes  attributes  to  the  understanding  itself  a 
kind  of  intuitive  power  of  discerning  the  causes  of  thing?, 
And  lastly  there  are  the  intuitions  of  genius  and  art  and  (H 
perfect  goodness,  and  the  intuition  of  the  wise  mind  regarding,' 
life  as  a  whole.  All  intuition  is  for  him  a  sort  of  direct 
beholding  of  truth  which  is  higher  than  logical  processes, 
although  perhaps  involving  these.^ 

This  fondness  of  Schopenhauer  for  the  supra-logical  char- 
acter of  intuition  and  genius  has  its  dangerous  side."  The 
intuition  is  the  expedient  not  so  much  of  the  philosopher  as 
of  the  artist.  A  philosophical  system,  of  course,  is  always  in 
a  certain  sense  the  attempt  to  fix  an  ideal,  and  so  compar- 
able to  the  work  of  the  artist.  And  perhaps  no  one  in  thi- 
twentieth  century  will  write  out  a  system  of  philosophy  rest- 
ing upon  one  ultimate  principle — ultimate  principles  must  bt 
to  a  certain  extent  abstract — who  has  not  the  courage  and 
faith  of  the  artist.  But  when  once  we  confess  that  a  system 
of  philosophy  is  largely  an  artistic  creation,  can  we  be  any 
longer  dogmatic  or  didactic  in  philosophy  ?  This  question 
is  part  of  the  refrain  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy.  The 
"  truth "  in  the  notion  that  philosophy  must  be  based  on 
intuitions  into  nature  is  that  philosophy  must  somehow  learn 
the  meaning  of  the  world  by  taking  up  a  passive  and  recipient 
attitude  towards  it,  studying  it  not  to  conquer  it  with  the 
"  might  of  thought "  but  in  order  to  conform  its  thought  ami 
feeling  to  things  as  they  are.     The  meaning  of  the  world  will 


^  In  chap.  iii.  will  be  found  an  account  of  the  different  kinds  of  knowledge 
Schopenhauer  supposes  man  to  possess. 
^  Cf.  chaps.  V.  and  vi. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      43 

reveal  itself  to  man  if  he  study  patiently  everything  that  pro- 
fesses to  be  in  the  world  and  everything  that  professes  to  be 
explanatory  of  it.  Schopenhauer  has  painted  life  as  a  tragedy  ; 
he  had  the  intellectual  ability  and  the  artistic  susceptibility 
to  have  painted  it  as  something  else  if  he  had  been  born  in  a 
different  age  with  a  diff"erent  temperament.  But  even  more 
than  in  his  insight  and  fine  susceptibility  of  mind,  his  strength 
lay  in  his  insistence  on  the  necessity  of  a  direct  attitude  to  life 
on  the  part  of  the  philosopher,  and  in  his  having  recourse  to 
observation  as  well  as  reflection.  Hegel's  thinking  through,  by 
"  the  might  of  thouglit,"  to  the  core  of  things  is  a  pleasing  fallacy. 
"  Nature  has  neither  kernel  nor  husk,"  as  Goethe  ^  puts  it. 

Schopenliauer,  it  may  be  repeated,  arrived  at  the  principle 
of  will  both  by  way  of  logic  or  dialectic  and  by  way  of  observa- 
tion. The  former  way  we  shall  examine  when  dealing  with 
his  theory  of  knowledge ;  the  latter  we  shall  treat  of  through- 
out just  as  he  himself  did.  We  are  supposed  to  find  that  the 
world  is  will  by  a  sort  of  cumulative  proof,  by  seeing  it  to  be 
true  of  most  ways  of  looking  at  the  world  and  of  most  things 
in  the  world,  and  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  There  is  only  one 
way  to  know  what  the  world  is,  and  that  is  observation.  Of 
course  it  is  equally  certain  that  to  state  what  the  world  is — 
to  state  what  we  see  it  to  be,  requires  reflection.  Schopen- 
hauer's devotion  to  physical  science  is  the  proof  that  he  did 
study  the  world  directly ;  his  being  a  Gelegcnheitsphilosoi^h  is 
a  proof  that  he  went  about  with  his  eyes  open,  roaming 
over  things;  his  mastering  Plato  is  a  proof  that  he  had 
the  power  of  abstract  thought  and  artistic  insight;  and  his 
thorough  mastery  of  Kant — he  perceived  the  general  drift 
of  Kantism  as  well  as  Hegel  did,  and  he  knew  the  details 
of  Kant's  work  better  than  most  of  his  contemporaries — 
proves  him  to  have  been  the  student  capable  of  prolonged, 

systematic,  hard  intellectual  labour.  

1  '  Gott  und  Welt,'  "  AUerdinga."  ;  . '      ; 


44  Schopenhauer's  system.  I 

As  to  the  influence  of  Plato  upon  Schopenhauer,  we  can 
quite  well  believe,  as  Professor  Wallace  puts  it,  that  a  youtli 
whose  belief  at  nineteen  was  that  "  there  is  a  spirit  world 
where,  separated  from  all  appearances  of  the  outer  world,  wi 
can,  in  detachment  and  absolute  repose,  survey  them  from  an 
exalted  seat,  however  much  our  bodily  part  may  be  tossed  in 
their  storm,"  ^  "  was  the  sort  of  subject  on  whom  the  teaclni 
of  the  theory  of  ideas  would  make  a  lasting  impression."  All 
through  his  life  the  belief  in  Plato's  noumenal  or  ideal  world 
probably  represented  to  him  the  minimum  amount  of  meta- 
physical belief  which  every  sane  person  ought  to  have.  The 
world  of  sense  and  of  understanding  ought,  as  compared  witli 
the  really  existent  world,  to  appear  merely  phenomenal,  vision- 
ary in  fact,  non-existent.  It  is  easy  to  a  certain  extent  to 
think  of  all  men  and  things  as  "  shadows."  We  shall  see  thi; 
in  dealing  with  Idealism.  "  The  creed  of  every  just  and  good 
man,"  Schopenhauer  says,  is,  "  I  believe  in  a  metaphysic." 

In  philosophy  Schopenhauer  followed  to  the  letter  tin 
advice  of  Schulze,  his  first  tutor,  to  study  almost  exclusively 
two  men,  Plato  and  Kant.  Plato  may  be  said  to  have  for  ever 
ruled  his  imagination,  as  Kant  did  his  understanding ;  tluv 
were  the  alpha  and  the  omega  of  his  philosophical  alphabet 
It  is  useless  to  think  of  Schopenhauer's  trying  to  learn  philo- 
sophy from  Hegel  or  from  Hegel's  philosophical  compeers  and 
predecessors;  he  never  could  have  done  so.  When,  at  the  age  oi 
twenty,  he  heard  Fichte  at  Berlin  in  1811  say  "  eloquent  things 

* 

about  the  'other'  (i.e.,  about  nature  as  different  from  the  self),  by 
the  light  of  a  lamp  in  November  afternoons,"  the  whole  thin^ 
seemed  to  him  to  be  hopelessly  in  the  air.  In  the  writings  oi 
Fichte,  Schelling,  and  Hegel  he  read  statements  about  pro- 
cesses which  purported  to  be  objective  events,  but  which  never 
did  happen,  and  never  could  have  happened.  There  some- 
times the  self  seemed  to  create  the  world,  and  sometimes  the 

'  Quoted  by  Wallace,  '  Life  of  Schopenhauer,'  p.  63. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      45 

world  to  create  tlie  self :  God  was  made  to  have  difficulties 
and  struggles  and  victories  just  like  a  human  being,  and  His 
movements  in  general  were  put  forward  as  something  we  could 
not  only  know,  but  ourselves  determine  and  compel  beforehand. 
It  was  this  idea  that  really  annoyed  Schopenhauer  just  as  it 
has  annoyed  so  many.  The  Absolute  with  which  these  post- 
Kantians  seemed  to  be  dealing;  and  with  whose  movements 
they  seemed  to  have  an  intimate  acquaintance,  did  not  appear 
to  him  to  have  been  in  the  language  of  Kant  "  deduced  "  or 
explained  at  all.^  It  is  generally  confessed  now  that  the 
objective  dialectic  which  Hegel  took  to  be  God's  unfolding 
of  Himself  is  primarily  nothing  else  than  a  description  of 
the  categories  which  the  human  mind  has  to  use  in  inter- 
preting reality.  So  much  Schopenhauer  must  have  seen  on 
the  mere  inspection  of  Hegelianism.  For  the  doctrine  of 
the  categories  he  preferred  to  turn  to  Kant,  where  he  could 
get  it  at  first  hand. 

Tiiere  is,  to  be  sure,  a  great  deal  more  in  Hegel  than  his 
'  Logic,*  which  he  was  certainly  wrong  in  converting  into  an 
ontology.  But  what  is  more  than  mere  dialectic  in  Hegel  can 
be  understood  only  by  taking  the  view  of  philosophy  already 
hinted  at,  as  something  more  than  the  mere  critical  analysis 
of  reality  given  in  scientific  metaphysic ; — in  a  word,  by  con- 
sidering the  Hegelian  system  as  having  a  place  in  the  evolution 
of  the  thought  of  the  nineteenth  century.  One  may  surely 
grant  that  it  is  impossible  to  say  what  the  Hegelian  system  is 
without  not  merely  a  general  knowledge  of  the  Zeit-Geist  at 
the  beginning  of  the  nineteenth  century,  but  a  pretty  profound 
knowledge  of  the  literary,  philosophical  and  political  aspira- 
tions of  Germany  during  the  period  of  the  war  of  liberation. 
Here  however  Schopenhauer,  as  a  post-Kantian,  parts  company 
with  Hegel.  If  there  was  one  thing,  as  we  saw,  for  which 
Schopenhauer  had   no   sense   and   perhaps   no  patience,  that 

^  Chap.  viii.  discusses  in  detail  some  of  the  points  of  this  paragraph. 


u 


SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 


was  history  and  historical  problems.  If  to  appreciate  Hegel 
meant  an  honest  study  of  history,  we  need  not  wonder  that 
Schopenhauer  did  not  appreciate  Hegel,  Schopenhauer  had 
the  contempt  for  history  that  Plato  had  for  poetry.  We  re- 
member how  Aristotle  ^  distinctly  said  that  poetry  was  more 
philosophical  than  and  superior  to  history  (^tXoffo^wrf/aov  koI 
airov^aioTtpov  Trotrjtrtc  IrrTopluQ).  In  a  later  chapter  we  shall 
see  what  art  in  general  meant  to  Schopenhauer.  To  say  the 
very  least,  he  cordially  assents  to  Aristotle's  dictum.  He  re- 
garded even  biography  as  superior  to  history  ;  it  showed  the 
nature  of  man,  while  history  only  talked  about  external  events 
and  changes.  "  History  ...  is  a  kind  of  knowledge,  but 
it  is  no  science.  .  .  .  History  nowhere  takes  cognisance  of 
the  particular  through  the  general ;  it  is  compelled  to  take 
hold  of  the  particular  as  such,  and  then  go  creeping  along  the 
ground  of  experience,  while  the  other  sciences  really  float  over 
experience.  The  sciences  talk  about  groups  of  things,  history 
of  individuals."  Philosophy,  it  is  thus  implied,  is  superior  both 
to  history  and  to  science.  Poetry,  to  Schopenhauer,  is  cer- 
tainly far  more  important  to  the  philosopher  than  history,  for 
poetry  presents  him  with  types  of  men  and  with  the  typical 
aims  and  ideas  of  man.  This  is  true  of  all  the  arts  indeed, 
and  to  Schopenhauer  the  most  universal  of  all  the  arts  were 
poetry  and  music.*^ 

In  the  eyes  of  Schopenhauer  the  problem  of  philosophy  was 
to  give  an  analysis  of  the  world  that  would  be  valid  for  all 
time.  He  knew  that  Kant,  like  Plato,  had  tried  this.  To 
give  such  an  analysis  made  a  man  a  philosopher.  He  saw 
the  negative  consequences  of  the  Kantian  position  that  we 
know  only  phenomena.  As  is  indicated  above,  this  might  be 
generalised  into  the  statement  that  whatever  philosophy  pro- 

1  Aristotle,  Poet.,  9,  1451  b  6. 

^  In  addition  to  the  Hegelian  philosophy,  there  are  several  specific  things  which 
Schopenhauer's  contempt  for  history  prevented  him  from  understanding.    Chaps. 
~  vi.,  vii.,  viii.,  ix.  will  exemplify. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      47 

fesses  to  do,  it  should  not  confine  itself  to  the  study  of  material 
forces  and  material  entities.  These  things,  as  it  were,  are  all 
merely  "  phenomenal  "  and  "  secondary,"  and  the  lesson  of  the 
world  will  not  be  found  in  them.  He  certainly  saw  that 
Kant's  work  was  perfectly  definite,  but  he  did  not  see  exactly 
what  it  was  that  Kant  had  done.  Kant  virtually  dismissed  the 
God  of  the  eighteenth  century  from  the  objects  of  legitimate 
inquiry  to  the  human  mind,  or  at  least  the  idea  that  God  was 
a  mere  external  tiling  or  being,  a  mere  mover  of  matter  and  a 
cause  for  which  no  prior  cause  could  be  alleged.  Schopenhauer 
did  not  see  that  Fichte  and  Hegel  had  given  up  the  inquiry 
after  an  external  God  and  an  external  end  of  the  world,  and 
were  seeking  all  this  within  the  world — within  man  in  fact. 
To  that  extent  they  had  grasped  the  nineteenth-century  idea 
of  organism  far  better  than  he  had,  and  were  giving  men  an 
account  of  the  world  which  they  could  appreciate.  In  his 
list  of  the  categories  Kant  had  given  an  analysis  of  reality 
fur  all  time ;  but  in  his  teleology  he  simply  brought  the 
thought  of  the  eighteenth  century  to  a  conclusion,  showing 
in  genoral  that  we  could  not  possibly  know  what  external 
design  an  external  God  might  have  for  the  world. 

Schopenhauer  now  took  up  the  problem  of  teleology  (which 
Kant  held  not  solved,  but  a  faulty  statement  of  which  Kant 
liad  dismissed  as  unworthy  of  philosophy),  and  insisted  on 
giving  an  analysis  of  teleology  that  is  somehow  valid  for 
.ill  time.  Hegel  was  working  at  a  purely  formal  solution 
of  the  question  of  teleology — seeking  merely  to  show  how 
the  mind  "  can  know  the  world  as  realised  purpose " ;  Scho- 
penhauer wanted  to  give  a  real  or  material  answer  to  the 
(question,  to  tell  man  what  he  was  actually  striving  for.  To 
do  this  he  found  he  had  to  reconsider  the  whole  teaching  of 
Kant  about  phenomena  and  things  in  themselves.  Although 
Schopenhauer  would  indignantly  disclaim  any  spiritual  brother- 
hood with  Fichte  or  Schelling,  it  remains  true  that  his  philo- 


48  Schopenhauer's  system. 

sophy  of  will  inevitably  connects  him  with  Fichte,  just  as  his 
philosophy  of  instinct  and  the  unconscious  inevitably  connects 
him  with  Schelling.  We  shall  have  to  consider  how  it  was 
that  a  philosophy  of  volition  led  Schopenhauer  to  pessimism 
while  it  led  Fichte  to  optimism;  and  how  Schopenhauer 
could  never  see  anything  but  a  terrible  conflict  between  the 
automatic  and  the  spontaneous,  between  the  sub-conscious  and 
the  conscious,  between  instinct  and  reason,  while  Schelling 
was  able  to  connect  in  a  manner  the  sub-conscious  or  the 
automatic  in  man  with  what  is  conscious  and  deliberate.^ 

To  return  to  Schopenhauer's  study  of  Plato.  Schopenhauer 
always  retained  as  a  piece  of  his  mental  furniture  the  Platonic 
theory  of  ideas.  He  speaks  of  "  Ideas  "  in  the  plural  generally 
as  Aristotle  did,  and  tlie  Ideas  meant  to  him  roughly  the 
archetypes  of  the  various  species  or  kinds  of  existences  that 
are  found  in  nature.  He  is  a  realist  in  believing  that  the 
universal  exists  somehow  before  the  things,  although  he  goes 
so  far  with  the  nominalist  as  to  hold  that  the  boundary  lines 
of  what  we  call  a  class  are  imaginary  or  mental.  In  general, 
however,  his  version  of  the  '  Theory  of  Ideas '  is  far  removed 
from  the  puzzles  of  scholastic  logic  on  the  matter  by  beinu 
made  to  wear  the  dynamic  character  of  his  system.  Tin 
"  Ideas "  represent  to  him  the  different  forms  of  existence 
manifested  in  individual  things  and  beings.  There  are  the 
Ideas,  for  example,  of  the  simple  elementary  forces  of  nature 
exhibited  in  the  formation  of  ice,  clouds,  and  so  on,  and  then 
there  are  the  Ideas  of  the  different  forms  of  material  things, 
and  finally  the  Ideas  of  the  different  species,  including  man, 
up  to  the  Ideas  which  difterent  men  in  a  sense  represent. 
In  general,  too,  he  constructed  for  himself  from  Plato  the 
belief  that  our  vision  into  the  realm  of  things  in  themselves, 
into  ultimate  reality,  is  an  affair  of  insight  or  imaginative  and 
contemplative  reason,  and  not  of  theoretical  or  discursive  know- 

^  See  portions  of  chaps,  vi.,  vii.,  viii.,  and  ix. 


GENERAL   VIEW    OF   SCHOPENHAUER's    SIGNIFICANCE.       49 

ledge,  which  latter  is  concerued  solely  with  the  causal  rela- 
tions or  phenomenal  connections  of  things. 

This  was  all  in  its  own  way  a  bit  of  unproved  assumption 
on  the  part  of  Schopenhauer,  of  a  piece,  in  fact,  with  the 
doctrine  of  an  "  assertive  "  reason — a  reason  that  could  make 
positive  assertions  about  the  ultimate  principle  of  things — by 
the  Hegelians,  after  Kant  had  condemned  such  an  idea.  And 
Schopenhauer  condemned  it  anew.  But  to  doubt  the  exist- 
ence of  the  Platonic  Ideas  meant  to  Schopenhauer  to  doubt  of 
any  sort  of  substratum  to  experience,  which  was  absurd,  since 
the  world  we  know  with  our  senses  is  only  phenomenal  ap- 
pearance. We  shall  have  to  say  at  the  close  of-  our  study 
whether  this  line  of  thought  has  any  basis  of  solid  fact 
beneath  it.^ 

Platonism  meant  to  Schopenhauer,  too,  the  practical  superi- 
ority of  philosophic  to  ordinary  virtue.  The  ordinary  man 
could  attain,  as  it  were,  to  philosophic  virtue  only  through 
the  baptism  of  genius,  through  a  vision  of  the  Ideas.  In  the 
faces  of  Kaphael's  and  Correggio's  pictures,  and  in  the  lives  of 
tlie  mystics  of  all  religions,  Schopenhauer  read  a  "  sure  and 
certain  gospel."  With  the  Platonic  idea  of  philosophic  virtue 
he  associated  the  Buddhistic  idea  of  perfect  enlightenment 
and  complete  resignation  and  abandonment  of  the  struggle  of 
life.  "  The  greatest  and  the  most  important  and  the  most 
significant  thing  the  world  can  show  is  not  he  who  conquers 
|the  world,  but  he  who  overcomes  it ;  and  this  is  just  the  quiet 
mobserved  course  of  life  of  a  man  in  whom  a  knowledge  of 
the  vanity  and  nothingness  of  the  whole  struggle  of  life  has 
irisen,  and  who  accordingly  gives  up  and  denies  that  will 
i^hich  would  fill  everything  and  strives  after  everything."  ^ 

We  suggested  that  in  Schopenhauer's  account  of  teleology 

'  Cf.  pp.  108,  235,  303. 

"  Itejahung  u.  Verueinung  iles  Willeus,  Werke,  ii.  456.     Cf.  p.  25,  ako  chaps. 
jrii.  and  viii. 

S 


50  Schopenhauer's  system. 

was  to  be  found  a  corrective  to  this  erroneous  notion  of  thi 
insight  and  contemplation  of  the  philosopher  being  taken  to 
be  the  highest  happiness,  even  although  Schopenhauer  himselt 
represents  the  whole  philosophy  of  genius-worship.  It  is  true 
that  his  philosophy  of  will  does  bring  us  to  and  keep  us  more 
surely  on  the  plane  of  the  world  we  actually  live  in,  than  does 
the  rational  morality  of  metaphysicians  generally;  and  tlii^ 
in  spite  of  his  own  starting-point  which,  as  is  common  ii: 
philosophy,  is  a  search  for  the  absolute  or  the  thing  in  itself, 
We  shall  find  a  contradiction  all  along  between  Schopenhauer'^ 
metaphysics  and  his  positive  teaching;  but  it  is  the  positive 
teaching  which  we  shall  try  to  extricate  from  the  contradictini. 
and  to  use  as  an  engine  of  war  against  much  of  his  own  meta- 
physic  (which  he  unconsciously  took  from  the  philosopher^ 
and  against  much  traditional  metaphysic  too.^  Equally  stroii. 
with  Schopenhauer's  feeling  for  Platonism  was  his  perceptin: 
that  idealism  needed  to  be  thought  out  all  over  again — a 
T.  H.  Gr-^.en  afterwards  suggested  in  England.  To  think  oi 
the  Absolute  as  Idea  seemed  to  him  a  very  poor  way 
grasping  the  reality  of  the  will  of  the  universe — a  charac- 
terisation of  God  that  is  quite  out  of  keeping  with  the  mereljl 
regulative  or  practical  value  assigned  to  reason  by  Kant. 

It  was,  in  general,  into  the  noumenal  world  that  Schopeii 
hauer  retired  when  he  revolted  from  prevalent  materialisi 
He  was  a  foe  of  the  merely  naturalistic  theology  and  crass 
realism  and  sensuous  empiricism  which  developed  out  of  tli 
Hegelian  Left.  It  was  "  all  a  mistake,"  he  thought,  the  attemp: 
to  treat  of  noumenal  things  and  religious  truths  of  mystics 
import  by  the  historic  and  realistic  method ;  it  was  tantamoun; 
to  reducing  knowledge  of  these  things  to  the  level  of  the  undcf^ 
standing,  which,  as  Kant  saw,  knew  only  phenomena,  instea^ 
of  leaving  them  to  be  matter  of  purified  insight.  Schopec 
hauer's  treatment  of  religious  truths  is  far  sounder  in  con' 
1  Cf.  chap,  vi.,  and  pp.  375,  434,  453. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.       51 

ception  than  that  of  many  writers  of  the  historical  or  natural- 
istic scliool,  who  often  seem  to  forget  that  the  enumeration  of 
the  objects  around  which  religious  feelings  have  entwined 
themselves  is  something  quite  different  from  an  account  of 
the  intuitive  religious  instinct  itself.  Schopenhauer  had  a 
deep  and  a  real  insight  into  spiritual  things,  and  always 
insists  on  the  necessity,  in  religious  matters,  of  that  spiritual 
receptivity  of  soul  which  is  an  essential  ingredient  in  all 
faith.  And  so  he  scoffed  at  the  limitations  of  the  so-called 
rationalistic  and  historical  method  of  treating  religious  ideas, 
— limitations  which  become  very  apparent  when  that  method 
puts  itself  forward  as  the  final  way  of  dealing  with  religious 
conceptions. 

The  most  distinctively  logical  influence  over  Schopenhauer, 
however,  was  Kant's  teaching  in  the  '  Criticism  of  Pure  Eeason.' 
Of  course  he  could  hardly  have  failed  to  apprehend  the  critical 
idea,  and  his  theory  of  knowledge,  set  forth  in  his  '  Fourfold 
Eoot  of  the  Principle  of  Sufficient  Eeason,'  is  mainly  a  system- 
atic development  of  Kant's  teaching  on  first  principles.  But 
the  results  of  the  critical  idea  in  Kant  weighed  far  more  with 
Schopenhauer  than  even  the  idea  itself,  and  became  to  him 
matter  of  definite  conviction.  The  criticisms  that  Schopen- 
hauer felt  inclined  to  make  on  Kant's  theory  of  knowledge 
are  of  some  importance.  As  we  shall  see,  they  forced  philo- 
sophers to  reconsider  carefully  the  nature  of  what  were  called 
forms  of  knowledge.  But  by  far  the  most  important  effects 
of  Kant's  influence  over  Schopenhauer  are  to  be  seen  in  the 
conclusions  he  drew  from  what  he  conceived  to  be  the  per- 
fectly finished  part  of  Kant's  work.  He  regarded  Kant  to 
luive  established  for  ever  the  distinction  between  phenomena 
-and  noumena. 

From  Kant  he  learned  that  the  science  to  which  his  mind 
laturally  resorted  as  a  sure  account  of  man's  life  was  a  logi- 


52  Schopenhauer's  system. 

cally  justifiable  view  of  things — a  view  even  to  be  emphasised; 
but  that  still  there  was  in  all  knowledge  and  in   all  reality 
a  conditioning  x,  or  ultimate  principle,  which  was  itself  the 
source  of  all  necessity  in  the  realm  of  phenomena  and  yet 
above  the   necessity  of  which   it  was   the   source.     Herbert 
Spencer  ^  represents  this  idea  in  our  days,  and  is  so  far,  with 
Scho^  mhauer,  a  literal   follower  of   Kant.      It  was  perhaps 
that  most  dangerous  aspect  of  Kantism  that  Schopenhauer's 
mind  laid  hold  of  with  all  its  intuitive  force,  in  which  the 
world  is  so  much  given  over  to  "necessity"  that  it  almost 
seems  to  be  quite  independent  of  the  self  or  rational  will- 
strong  enough  to  resist  it  or  even  to  threaten  it.     In  this. 
his    philosoi)hy   of    science,   he   has   many   points   of    resem- 
blance to    r.  A.    Lange,    who    practically    gives    the    worl.l 
over   to   scientific   materialism,  and   leaves   us   the   realm  oi 
the  unknown  in  which  to  construct  the  fairy  palaces  of  art 
and  religion.-     Most  people  have  felt  the  unreality  of  tlu 
Kantian  proof  of  the  freedom  of  the  will,  for  the  noumeiial 
or  supra-sensuous  world  in  which  it  is  said  to  exist  seem- 
so  largely  a  matter  of   assertion  over  against  the  realm  <! 
nature,  which   seems    perfectly   determined  and   necessitateii 
within  itself.     The  idea  of  the  noumenal  world  is  the  positive 
side  of  Kant  which  Schopenhauer  accepts ;  and  we  need  no: 
explain  the  matter  further  just  now.     We  see  perfectly  tli 
tendency  of  Schopenhauer's  mind  j  he  learned  what  he  want, 
to  learn  in  Kant — Platonism  plus  Phenomenalism:  we  em| 
phasise  the  Platonism  because  Schopenhauer  snatched  it  out^' 
of  Kant  with  all  the  eagerness  of  a  man  who  has  found  k 
"  pearl  of  great  price."     He  regarded  Kant  as  having  prove ! 
at  least  indirectly,  the  existence  of  a  world  transcending  tl 
sense  world ;  and  the  existence  of  such  a  world  was  a  mattei 
of  feeling  and   conviction  with  him  throughout  life.     If  he 

'  First  Principles,  Part  i.  ft  isassm. 

'  Cf.  Qeschichte  des  Materialismus,  Bk.  ii.  Abschn.  4. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      53 

had  been  asked  to  describe  his  belief,  he  would  have  referred 
one  to  Plato  for  its  further  exhibition ;  if  he  had  been  asked 
for  its  grounds,  he  would  have  held  they  were  in  Kant. 

But  with  this  view  of  Kant  Schopenhauer  associated  one 
or  two  of  Kant's  negative  consequences,  and  insisted  on  these 
with  more  emphasis  than  many  of  the  so-called  Kantians 
themselves.  He  is  the  leader  of  those  Kantians,  like  F.  A. 
Lange  and  others,  who  insist  that  the  unique  contribution  of 
Kant  to  philosophy  is  to  be  found  in  the  '  Criticism  of  Pure 
Eeason,'  and  that  the  limitations  Kant  drew  up  in  regard  to 
knovv^ledge  are  the  chief  part  of  his  work.  He  emphasised  as 
strongly  as  he  could  the  idea  of  the  relativity  of  knowledge, 
holding  that  all  knowledge  was  of  phenomena,  and  that  every- 
thing we  talked  of  knowing  was  eo  ipso  a  conditioned  thing. 
On  Kant's  principles,  Schopenhauer  always  held,  we  do  not 
Jcnoiv  the  "  thing  in  itself,"  the  supreme  reality  of  the  world, 
the  entity  which  determines  all  other  things,  the  absolute ; 
that  remains  more  a  postulate  or  belief  than  an  object 
cf  rational  knowledge.  Whether  it  was  that  by  the  force 
of  his  nature  Schopenhauer  felt  that  the  supreme  reality 
of  the  world  or  of  human  thought  could  not  be  matter  of 
logical  knowledge  but  only  of  mystical  apprehension  or  faith,^ 
or  whether  it  was  that  he  learned  from  Kant  the  impossibility 
of  knowing  the  Absolute  in  a  perfectly  definite  and  rounded 
way,  it  is  perhaps  difficult  to  say.  But  it  is  needless  to  decide 
this.  In  any  case,  what  Schopenhauer  grew  convinced  of  was 
this,  that  the  knowledge  which  the  three  great  post-Kantian 
philosophers  alleged  to  be  possible  of  the  Absolute,  or  of  God, 
or  of  the  thing  in  itself,  or  of  the  kernel  beneath  the  "  husks  " 
of  phenomena,  or  of  the  inner  nature  of  the  world,  or  of  the 
transcendent  principle  of  things,  was  at  bottom  nothing  but 

'  He  never  used  the  term  faith  quite  in  this  connection,  although  he  might 
have  (lone  so  on  the  principle  that  it  is  through  ivill  that  we  know  the  meaning 
of  the  world.  Such  a  reflection  will  be  in  order  when  we  ai-e  studying  Schopen- 
hauor's  philosophy  of  religion. 


54  Schopenhauer's  system. 

"  wicked  "  verbiage :  verbiage,  because  Kant  had  shown  that 
knowledge  applied  only  to  phenomena,  only  to  objects ;  and 
wicked  verbiage,  because  these  men  ought  to  have  learned 
Kant's  lesson  better,  and  not  tried  to  ignore  his  true  meaning, 
and  to  teach  the  public  to  do  so.  "  In  vain,"  he  thinks,  "  does 
God  give  the  world  once  in  a  thousand  years  or  so  a  really 
great  mind  like  that  of  Kant,  if  aspirants  to  philosophical 
honours,  like  Fichte  and  Schelling,  are  to  be  allowed  to  ignore 
or  falsify  his  true  meaning ! "  "  Kant  is  a  master-mind  to 
whom  all  humanity  is  indebted  for  the  discovery  of  never- 
to-be-forgotten  truths.  One  of  his  chief  merits  is  to  have 
delivered  us  from  Leibnitz  and  his  subtleties ;  from  pre- 
established  harmonies,  etc.  .  .  .  Kant  has  made  philosophy 
serious,  and  I  am  keeping  it  so."  ^  There  is  no  science  of  God, 
we  hear  him  angrily  saying,  thinking  of  the  Wissenscliafts- 
lehre,  and  no  schematic  determination  of  the  movements  of 
the  Absolute  out  of  the  mere  idea,  thinking  of  the  '  Logic' 
If  these  men  and  their  utterances  really  presupposed  some 
thousands  of  years  of  revelation,  why  did  they  not  say  so  ? 
Fichte  wrote  a  '  Criticism  of  all  Revelation '  as  if  he  could 
dispense  with  revelation.  Hegel  assumed  revelation,  but  therein 
lies  the  mystery  of  his  system.  He  still  professed  to  get  all 
his  results  by  pure  reason,  and  in  the  end  he  sublimates  every- 
thing, God  and  man  included,  into  the  Idca.^ 

To  be  definite,  we  shall  see  that  Schopenhauer  found  a 
significance  which  neither  Fichte  nor  Schelling  nor  Hegel 
found,  in  the  negative  work  of  Kant,  the  rejection  of  every- 
thing which  could  be  claimed  to  be  dogmatic  or  definite 
knoivledge  about  the  essence  of  the  world  or  of  the  thing  in 
itself.  It  is  necessary  to  emphasise  the  word  knowledge,  for 
knowledge  means  to  Schopenhauer  only  the  connecting  of  one 

^  y.  cl.  Willen  in  d.  Natur.     Vorrede,  Werke,  iv.  xxiii. ;  Eng.  transl.  (Bohn), 
p.  206. 

-  Hegel's  Idea  differs  from  Schopenhauer's  Platonic  Idea. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's    SIGNIFICANCE.       55 

thing  with  another  causally  as  we  do  in  science.  If  we  hold 
that  there  is  a  higher  kind  of  knowledge  than  that — the  know- 
ledge, say,  that  our  total  consciousness  of  things  gives  us — it 
must  be  said  that  Schopenhauer  pointed  this  out,  but  that,  as 
there  is  more  in  this  than  mere  reason  and  understanding,  he 
finds  the  word  knowledge  inadequate  to  describe  it.  Fichte 
tried  to  make  the  practical  reason  of  Kant  do  by  a  tour  de 
force  what  Kant  himself  could  not  make  pure  reason  do,  but 
there  was  a  presumption  against  attributing  to  the  practical 
reason  a  spontaneity  which  could  not  be  claimed  for  the  theo- 
retical reason.  Schelling  invented  a  faculty,  which  he  called 
liitellcctnal  intuition,  to  do  what  Kant  had  declared  reason 
could  not  do ;  but  a  mere  name  could  not,  a  century  and 
;i  half  after  Locke's  '  Essay,'  be  supposed  to  create  a  reality. 
"  A  reason  which  supplies  material  knowledge  primarily  out 
(tf  its  own  resources,  and  conveys  positive  information  tran- 
scending the  sphere  of  possible  experience ;  a  reason  which, 
in  order  to  do  this,  must  contain  innate  ideas, — is  a  pure 
liction,  invented  by  our  professional  philosophers  and  the 
l)roduct  of  the  terror  with  which  Kant's  '  Criticism  of  Pure 
lleason  '  has  inspired  them."  ^  Hegel  made  his  "Absolute  "  play 
the  double  rdle  of  the  artificer-deity  of  the  eighteenth  century, 
and  of  the  organism  or  cell  of  the  nineteenth ;  but  he  got  rid 
of  the  logical  objection  raised  by  Kant  to  knowing  the  Uncon- 
ditioned only  by  crediting  the  Absolute  itself  with  a  dialectic, 
which  many  critics  perceived  to  be  simply  the  tentative  efforts 
I  he  human  mind  itself  makes  in  its  search  for  truth. 

Schopenhauer,  like  a  true  disciple  of  Bacon  and  Locke, 
simply  gave  up,  at  least  in  his  intellectual  philosophy,  the 
belief  in  the  absolute  spontaneity  of  reason,  and  the  belief  in 
an  essence  of  things  or  a  thing  in  itself,  which  is  merely  "  the 
siibject  of  logical  predicates,"  as  in  Hegel.  The  positive  as 
well  as  the  merely  negative  advantages  of  this  we  may 
^  Fourfold  Root,  &c. ;  Eng.  transl.  (Bolm's  Library,  1889),  p.  138. 


06  Schopenhauer's  system. 

perhaps  see  later.^  But  "  leaving  the  gods  in  peace,"  as 
Schopenhauer  suggests  philosophy  should,  we  shall  probably 
find  that,  as  far  as  the  human  self  goes,  Schopenhauer's 
analysis  contains  most  of  the  elements  with  which  his  con- 
temporaries or  predecessors  occupied  themselves.  The  con- 
ception of  the  self  as  will  is  really  tantamount  to  saying 
that  man  is  organic  activity,  and  in  such  organic  activity 
consciousness  and  feeling  are  of  course  included. 

It  takes  little  meditation  on  the  work  of  Schopenhauer  and 
Schelling  and  Hegel  to  see  that  their  descriptions  of  transcen- 
dental potencies  may  be  easily  translated  into  very  plain  prose 
statements  about  the  various  energies  or  activities  the  human 
personality  exhibits  in  its  efforts  to  understand  the  world  and 
assert  itself  amid  the  flux  of  things.  The  self  is  in  a  sense 
the  key-note  to  reality,  and  the  system  of  Schopenhauer  can 
easily  be  reduced  to  an  attempt  to  attain  that  self-knowledge 
which,  as  far  back  as  Socrates,  was  said  to  be  the  beginning 
and  the  end  of  wisdom.  In  the  purposes  of  human  beings  are 
to  be  found  the  peculiar  problems  of  philosophy  as  different 
from  science.  If  science  suggests  that  it  knows  how  human 
persons  are  made, — out  of  atoms  and  cells,  for  example, — so 
that  a  cosmogony  could  take  the  place  of  philosophy,  philo- 
sophy can  always  tell  science  that  it  knows  not  that  of  which 
it  speaks.  There  are  really  moral  grounds,  too,  if  we  will  come 
to  that  (and  we  ought  to,  without  shame),  for  resenting  the 
boundless  aggressiveness  of  the  scientific  spirit.  The  end  of 
this  century  will  perhaps  see  clearly  that  science,  in  becoming 
dogmatic  about  the  human  personality,  has  played  the  human 
race  false,  has  in  fact  blinded  it.  Scientific  philosophy  is  not 
philosophy.  The  very  course  of  Schopenhauer's  system  shows 
this,  for  it  destroys  itself  in  the  attempt  to  make  a  lower  form 
of  activity  (instinct  or  passion)  overturn  alike  the  spiritual 
heritage   of  the   individual   and   the   etiiical   possibility  of  a 

^  See  the  conclusion  of  chap.  iii. ;  also  chaps,  ix.  and  x. 


GENERAL    VIEW    OF   SCHOPENHAUER  S   SIGNIFICANCE.      57 

perfect  human  society.  There  is  much  in  the  thought  that 
the  reality  of  the  world  and  of  the  individual  consists  in 
will ;  but  the  will  that  should  be  selected  for  this  honour  is 
rational  purpose  and  achievement,  and  not  mere  atomic  attrac- 
tion and  repulsion,  or  mere  organic  reaction  to  what  is  called 
external  stimulus.^ 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  of  considerable  significance 
from  the  point  of  view  of  the  philosophy  of  religion.  His 
treatment  of  religious  feeling  is  as  unique  as  is  his  treatment 
of  feeling  in  general.  We  have  indicated  that  his  general 
philosophy  results  in  a  sort  of  illusionism,  a  systematically 
negative  attitude  towards  life  ;  but  the  interesting  thing  about 
Schopenhauer  is  that  his  thought  was  as  far  from  stopping 
there  as  he  himself  was  from  observing  what  might  be  called 
a  pessimistic  or  suicidal  attitude  toward  life  in  his  own  person. 
He  essays  a  treatment  of  the  religious  problem  which  looks 
like  an  attempt  to  escape  from  the  consequences  of  illusionism 
or  pessimism.  And  he  succeeds  in  giving  us  some  reasons  for 
the  illusory  character  of  so  much  of  our  experience.  Is  this 
simply  owing  to  the  fact  that  in  explaining  the  world  he  took 
the  standpoint  of  the  will  rather  than  of  the  idea  ?  And  is  it 
true  that  philosophy  can  dispense  with  religion  ?  ^ 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy,  in  its  highest  reaches,  becomes 
virtually  a  metaphysic  of  the  redemption  of  the  individual 
from  his  own  misery  and  from  that  of  the  world.  That  there 
is  a  distinction  in  Schopenhauer  between  the  misery  of  the 
individual  and  the  misery  of  the  world,  will  cause  us  to 
inquire,  as  has  been  partly  hinted,  whether,  after  all,  Scho- 
penhauer's philosophy  is  consistent  pessimism,  or  whether  as 
a  matter  of  fact  any  philosophy  can  be  consistently  pessimistic. 
The  tendency  to  transfer  to  the  Absolute  what  are  generally 
regarded   as   marks    of    human    imperfection   is   not   so  pro- 

'  Cf.  chaps,  ii,,  vii.,  and  viii,  '^  Cf.  chaps,  viii.,  ix.,  x.  passim. 


58  Schopenhauer's  system.  , 

noimced  in  Schopenhauer  as  in  von  Hartmann,  but  it  is  to 
be  traced  in  him,  us  it  is  in  Schelling's  later  or  so-called 
positive  philosophy.  It  is  perhaps  easier  to  see  certain 
things  where  they  are  written  "  in  large  letters,"  and  thus 
if  Hegel  transferred  to  God  certain  intellectual  struggles  of 
the  human  mind  in  its  search  for  truth,  Schopenhauer  may  be 
regarded  as  having  tried  to  transfer  to  God  certain  volitional 
struggles  of  the  human  will  in  its  effort  to  attain  to  goodness 
and  self-control. 

Schopenhauer  will  teach  us  that  Hegel's  confidence  in  an 
"  absolute  knowledge "  involves  many  erroneous  ideas  about 
knowledge ;  and  from  Schopenhauer's  failures  to  manage  suc- 
cessfully his  own  philosophy  of  will,  we  shall  learn  much  about 
the  inadequacy  of  his  own  ideas  about  goodness  and  the  moral 
life.  Many  of  these  latter  were  substantially  those  of  the 
philosophers  in  general,  who  all  practically  placed  philosophic 
virtue  or  contemplation  above  civic  virtue,  or  above  that  prosaic 
justice  and  fairness  of  ordinary  life  which  would-be  genius  is 
too  apt  to  depreciate.  And  so  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  will 
be  found  to  collapse  when  tested  on  the  highest  plane  of  human 
thought,  just  because  he  could  not  completely  free  himself  from 
the  influence  of  the  very  philosophy  he  had  been  all  along 
attacking,  the  philosophy  of  the  concept.  He  really  taught 
throughout  his  system  that  the  reason  of  man  is  only  some- 
thing that  is  subservient  to  his  will,  only  a  help  to  his  living 
better ;  but  when  he  came  to  the  ultimate  issues  of  his  thought 
he  relapsed  into  the  old  fallacy  of  contcmijlation  being 
superior  to  action.  There  is  a  great  truth  in  this  idea,  the 
idea  that  man  can  be  virtuous  only  if  he  reform  himself  "  from 
above,"  or  from  the  standpoint  of  his  highest  ideas  and  his 
highest  self.  But  a  merely  rational  philosophy  has  never 
quite  seen  how  to  harmonise  the  idea  of  virtue  with  the 
actual  will  of  mankind,  nor  could  Schopenhauer  see  how  to 
do  it  either. 


GENERAL   VIEW   OF   SCHOPENHAUER's   SIGNIFICANCE.      59 

There  are  other  reasons  why  Schopenhauer's  treatment  of 
religion  is  important.  It  is  essentially  different  from  that 
of  Kant  and  from  rationalism  gv  '^erally,  laying  far  more  stress 
on  the  peculiarly  religious  feelings  as  elements  in  the  solution 
of  the  religious  problem.  "Belief  is  like  love;  you  cannot 
compel  it."  It  is  true  that  no  one  can  know  God  without 
approaching  God  in  the  way  in  which  God  can  alone  be 
known.  All  this,  liowever,  had  better  be  reserved  for  another 
place,  where  it  will  be  treated  in  detail.  It  is  enough  here  to 
have  indicated  the  necessity  of  trying  to  estimate  Schopen- 
hauer's system  from  its  highest  and  final  point  of  view. 


x| 


00 


CHAPTER    II. 


SCHOPENHAUER    AND    IDEALISM. 

"  Ihr  folget  falscher  Spur ; 

Denkt  niclit,  wir  Hclierzen  ! 
1st  niclit  iler  Kerii  der  Niitiir 
Menseheii  iin  Herzeu  ? " 

— GoETHK,  Oott  und  Welt. 

"  *  The  world  is  my  idea ' :  this  is  a  truth  which  holds  good  for  every- 
thing that  lives  and  knows,  though  man  alone  can  bring  it  into  reflective 
and  abstract  consciousness.  If  he  really  does  this  he  has  attained  to  philo- 
sophical wisdom.  It  then  becomes  clear  and  certain  to  him  that  what  he 
knows  is  not  a  sun  and  an  earth,  but  only  an  eye  that  sees  a  sun,  a  hand 
that  feels  an  earth  ;  that  the  world  which  surrounds  him  is  there  only  as 
idea — i.e.,  only  in  relation  to  something  else,  the  consciousness  which  is 
himself.  If  any  truth  can  be  asserted  a  priori  it  is  this  ;  for  it  is  the  ex- 
pression of  the  most  general  form  of  all  possible  and  thinkable  experience, 
— a  form  which  is  more  general  than  time  or  space  jr  causality,  for  they 
all  presuppose  it ;  and  each  of  these,  which  we  have  seen  to  be  just  so 
many  modes  of  the  principle  of  sufficient  reason,  is  valid  only  for  a  par- 
ticular class  of  ideas  ;  whereas  the  antithesis  of  object  and  subject  is  the 
common  form  of  all  these  classes,  is  that  form  under  which  alone  any  idea 
of  whatever  kind  it  may  be,  abstract  or  intiiitive,  pure  or  empirical,  is 
possible  and  thinkable.  No  truth,  therefore,  is  more  certain,  more  inde- 
pendent of  all  others,  and  less  in  need  of  proof  than  this,  that  all  that 
exists  for  knowledge,  and  therefore  this  whole  world,  is  only  object  in 
relation  to  subject,  perception  of  a  perceiver — in  a  word,  idea."  ^ 

It  will  be  evident  from  what  has  been  said  in  the  preceding 
chapter  that  Schopenhauer's  philosophy,  like  most  philosophies, 
is  an  attempt  to  overcome  the  dualism  or  the  sense  of  dis- 

1  Die  Welt  ak  W.,  &c.,  Werke,  ii.  3.     H.  and  K.,  i.  3. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  61 

crepancy  and  contradiction  which  seems  to  characterise  most 
of  our  thought  about  the  world.  Tiiere  is  the  dualism,  for 
example,  between  the  natural  man  and  the  rational  man,  be- 
tween philosophical  idealism  and  philosophical  realism,  be- 
tween scientific  knowledge  and  religion  and  artistic  insight, 
and  so  on,  and  to  all  this  may  Schopenhauer  be  conceived  to 
address  himself.  What  he  more  especially  addresses  himself 
to  is  that  form  of  the  dualism  between  the  lower  and  the 
higher  phases  of  consciousness  which  seems  to  be  peculiar  to 
the  nineteenth  century,  with  its  insistence  upon  the  idea  of  a 
natural  development  and  genesis  of  all  living  beings. 

To  Schopenhauer  the  broadest  opposition  in  the  world  is 
that  between  what  he  calls  will  and  what  he  calls  intellect. 
His  meaning  may  be  grasped  by  thinking  of  the  way  in  which 
dogmatic  materialism  reduced  everything  in  the  world  to  two 
things  called  matter  and  force.  To  this  it  is  rightly  objected 
that  it  leaves  consciousness  out  of  account ;  if  we  are  purely 
the  result  of  natural  forces,  how  is  it  that  we  can  think  our- 
selves to  be  such  ?  Matter  might,  as  Locke  suggested,  be 
"  made  by  God  "  to  think,  but  matter  as  matter  does  not  think. 
There  are  then  matter  and  the  different  natural  forces  on  the 
one  hand,  and  thought  or  consciousness  on  the  other.  But 
some  physicists  have  maintained  that  matter  itself  may  be 
reduced  to  force,  and  modern  psycho-physics  has  suggested 
tliat  consciousness  may  be  regarded  as  only  psychical  force — 
a  higher  kind  of  force  doubtless  than  the  various  forms  of 
energy  with  which  we  are  familiar,  but  still  a  force  which 
may  be  determined  both  qualitatively  and  quantitatively. 
This  thought  helps  us  to  appreciate  the  extreme  generality 
of  Schopenhauer's  principle.  His  will  is  really  any  and  all 
cosmic  or  psychic  energy;  he  uses  all  the  following  ex- 
pressions to  give  it  content :  will,  wish,  seeking,  stirring, 
effort,  impulse,  force,  push,  inclination,  passion,  fearing,  anger, 
hate,  hope,   excitation,    pressure ;    and    also    compares    it    to 


62  Schopenhauer's  system. 

gravitation  and  attraction,  and  chemical  force  and  plant  force. 
Granting  the  existence  of  such  a  principle  for  the  sake  of 
argument,  intellect  is  still  unexplained,  for  there  is  some- 
thing in  intellect  akin  to  "  pure  contemplation  " — this  is  essen- 
tial with  Schopenhauer — something  akin  to  the  imaginative 
reason  (^ewpta)  Plato  found  in  it.  There  is  a  great  difference 
or  opposition  between  mere  force  or  energy  and  an  idea.  The 
world,  in  short,  may  be  regarded  as  analysable  into  will  or 
movement  on  the  one  hand,  and  intellect  or  contemplation 
on  the  other,^ 

Schopenhauer  regards  this  dualism  as  quite  different  from 
and  opposed  to  the  dualism  of  Descartes.  "  In  reality  there 
is  neither  spirit  nor  matter,  but  rather  a  vast  amount  of  non- 
sense and  illusion  in  the  world.  The  force  of  inertia  in  the 
stone  is  just  as  inexplicable  as  the  thought  in  the  brain  of 
man,  and  we  might  on  that  ground  attribute,  say,  a  spirit  to 
the  stone.  If  you  assume  in  every  brain  a  spirit  like  a  sort 
of  deus  ex  machind,  you  ought  to  concede  a  spirit  to  every 
stone.  If  your  dead  and  passive  matter  can  strive  in  the 
form  of  inertia  or  attract  in  the  form  of  electricity,  repel  and 
yield  sparks,  it  can  just  as  well  think  in  the  form  of  brain- 
stuff.  In  short,  you  can  assign  matter  to  any  form  of  spirit, 
and  spirit  to  any  form  of  matter,  from  which  it  follows  that 
the  opposition  is  false.  Thus  the  Cartesian  division  of  all 
things  into  spirit  and  matter  is  not  philosophically  correct, 
but  rather  that  into  will  and  idea ;  and  this  division  does  not 
run  parallel  to  the  former  at  all.  It  spiritualises  everything 
by  analysing  what  is  material  in  things  into  idea  or  presenta- 
tion, and  on  the  other  hand  reducing  the  essence  of  every 

*  Schopenhauer  may  <^hus  be  said  to  give  an  equivalent  for  the  scientific  distinc- 
tion between  matter  and  force.  If  for  "  force  "  he  is  allowed  to  substitute  "  will," 
he  might  claim,  as  an  idealist,  the  right  to  substitute  for  matter  the  word  "  idea," 
matter  being  to  him  as  to  J.  S.  Mill  and  to  Berkeley  simply  the  "permanent 
possibility  of  sensation,"  or,  as  he  prefers  to  put  it,  simplj'  the  "  object "  or  the 
"idea"  of  a  "subject"  or  bein^  which  "perceives." 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  63 

phenomenon  into  will."^  This  spiritualisation  of  everything 
material  of  which  Schopenhauer  here  talks  is  our  point  of 
departure  in  this  chapter.  All  bodies  and  things  and  objects 
are  to  Schopenhauer  at  the  very  outset  as  to  Berkeley  ideas 
or  phenomena,  or  presentations  of  a  subject. 

We  shall  in  this  chapter  be  occupied  with  the  problem  of 
philosophy  as  it  presented  itself  to  Schopenhauer,  and  with  the 
way  in  which  he  commenced  to  think  out  his  system,  and  in 
doing  so  we  shall  try  to  take  the  mean  between  a  logical  and 
a  historical  presentation  of  his  thought.  There  is  no  such 
arrangement  in  his  work  as  there  is  in  the  work  of  Kant 
and  Hegel ;  there  are  simply  the  central  thought  and  the 
"  thousand  and  one  "  ways  in  which  it  is  set  forth.  He  had 
thought  out  the  outlines  of  his  system  while  still  a  young  man, 
and  he  found  that  the  experience  of  a  lifetime  tended  only  to 
make  him  amplify  and  illustrate  and  present  more  clearly, 
rather  than  modify,  what  he  had  given  to  the  world  in  his 
youth. 

We  may  understand  the  different  ar.pects  which  Schopen- 
hauer's attempt  to  overcome  the  dualisms  in  experience  assumes 
by  thinking  of  the  different  philosophical  sciences.  In  ethics, 
for  instance,  Schopenhauer  practically  treats  of  what  Spinoza 
calls  the  bondage  of  man  as  opposed  to  the  liberty  of  man — 
that  is,  man's  subjection,  on  the  one  hand,  to  the  control  of  his 
natural  feelings  or  passions,  and  of  man's  freedom  or  eman- 
cipation, on  the  other,  through  some  higher  mental  experience, 
such  as  "  insight,"  or  "  regeneration,"  or  "  intellectual  love." 
In  treating  of  Schopenhauer's  ethics  we  shall  encounter  the 
problem  of  pessimism  in  the  strict  sense,  the  contention  that 
"  all  life  is  essentially  unsatisfactory  "  and  illusory.  In  meta- 
physic  we  shall  find  Schopenhauer  occupied  with  that  most 
natural  aspect  of  what  we  broadly  call  dualism,  the  distinc- 
tion  between   appearance   and   reality,   between  illusion   and 

1  Schop.,  Zur.  Phil.  u.  W.  d.  Natur.,  Parerg.,  Werke,  vi.  110. 


64  Schopenhauer's  system. 

fact.  All  minds  which  have  risen  above  unreflective  realism, 
or  the  practical  faith  of  common-sense,  have  felt  the  distinc- 
tion between  appearance  and  reality,  and  indeed  are  half  in- 
clined to  side  with  the  doctrine  which  teaches  that  what  is 
apparent  is  essentially  illusory,  and  that  only  what  is  hidden 
or  concealed  is  real.  Schopenhauer  would  regard  a  mind  which 
had  not  attained  to  a  sense  of  this  distinction  as  not  a  "  fit 
subject  for  philosophy,"  and  so  would  his  successor  von  Hart- 
mann.  And  in  dialectics  we  shall  find  Schopenhauer  occupied 
with  the  distinction  between  real  knowledge,  or  knowledge 
which  has  content,  of  which  we  are  immediately  conscious, 
andi  formal  knowledge,  or  knowledge  that  has  only  an  indirect 
and  hypothetical  relation  to  reality.^ 

The  earliest  presentation  that  Schopenhauer  gave  of  his 
thought  was  in  connection  with  dialectics  or  the  theory  of 
knowledge,  in  his  graduating  thesis  entitled  the  '  Fourfold  Eoot 
of  the  Principle  of  Sufficient  Eeason.'  This  was  natural 
enough,  as  he  was  led  into  philosophy  by  Kant's  '  Criticism  of 
Pure  Eeason,'  which  is  primarily  a  treatise  on  the  theory  of 
knowledge.  We  might  begin  the  study  of  his  thought  by 
discussing  the  problem  of  this  thesis.  But  there  are  objec- 
tions to  this — objections  arising  out  of  the  special  character 
of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy.  Schopenhauer  is  not,  as  we 
saw,  a  philosopher  of  the  pure  idea ;  he  did  not  believe  that 
the  pure  idea  dominated  man's  life,  and  it  certainly  did  not 
dominate  his  own  thinking  and  his  own  life.  To  begin  with 
Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge  would  be  to  credit  him 
by  implication  with  a  method  and  a  technic  he  never  possessed 
and  never  wished  to  possess.  Then  knowledge  is  not  a  primary 
thing  with  him  but  a  secondary ;  he  once  or  twice,  in  fact, 
calls  it  a  tertiary  thing,  a  phenomenon  of  the  brain  which 
is  itself  only  a  phenomenon  of  the  body.  And  again,  no 
sympathetic  student  of   Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge 

'  Cf.  infra,  chap.  iii.  sec.  iii. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  65 

could  say  that  its  results  are  really  worked  out  from  the  pure 
standpoint  of  knowledge  alone.  It  is  not  exactly  that  it 
shows  bias,  that  it  is  a  statement  of  the  facts  of  knowledge 
in  the  interests  of  a  system, — we  shall  see  this  in  treating  of 
it  separately,^ — but  it  is  that  Schopenhauer  faced  the  problem 
of  the  nature  of  knowledge  from  the  point  of  view  of  the 
whole  Kantian  philosophy,  that  his  interest  in  the  problem  of 
knowledge  was  unconsciously  controlled  by  his  interest  in  the 
broader  problem  of  philosophy  as  a  whole.  Knowledge  to 
Schopenhauer  was  only  one  of  the  facts  of  life  (this  is  a  good 
thing  to  remember  in  reading  him),  although  the  problem  of 
knowledge  was  to  him  the  introduction  to  philosophy.  He 
had  been  influenced  by  science  before  he  was  influenced  by 
philosophy,  and  his  thought  shows  signs  of  this — hence  the 
valuable  corrective  influence  it  exercises  over  the  mind  that 
has  been  too  deeply  imbued  with  the  teachings  of  the  idealists. 
He  cares  far  more  about  the  objects  of  knowledge — the  nature 
of  the  reality  that  knowledge  professes  to  bring  within  our  ken 
— than  about  the  mere  forms  and  processes  of  knowledge  itself. 
He  made,  it  is  true,  one  or  two  important  criticisms  of  Kant's 
treatment  of  the  forms  of  knowledge,  but  he  is  always  im- 
patient to  get  from  knowledge  to  reality.  For  our  purposes, 
in  short,  the  most  significant  aspects  of  Schopenhauer's  theory 
of  knowledge  lie  at  the  point  where  it  runs  into  his  general 
philosophy.     We  must  therefore  begin  with  the  latter. 

It  is  at  once  strange  and  true  and  natural  that  Schopenhauer 
begins  in  philosophy  with  idealism  as  a  starting-point.  It 
is  strange,  because  his  philosophy  is  undoubtedly  in  the 
main  realistic  and  dynamic,  and  at  least  half  materialistic, 
representing  the  substitution  of  physical  for  metaphysical 
entities.  It  is  true,  for  his  main  book  begins  with  the  word& 
"  The  world  is  my  idea,"  and  his  theory  of  knowledge  does 

*  Cf.  chai).  iii. 

E  ♦ 


66  Schopenhauer's  system. 

not  occupy  itself  with  the  relation  of  ideas  to  fact,  but  with 
the  relation  of  the  different  classes  of  mental  representations 
(or  ideas)  to  each  other,  it  being  the  assumption  that  both 
what  we  call  things  and  what  we  call  ideas  are  mental  repre- 
sentations, idealities  in  short.  It  is  natural,  because  some 
kind  of  idealism  is  the  natural  resting-place  of  a  mind  which 
has  broken  with  common-sense  realism  (by  believing  that  what 
seems  real  is  often  only  apparent)  and  is  still  unable  to  choose 
between  the  hypotheses  of  absolute  idealism  and  Spinozistic 
pantheism  and  hypothetical  idealism.  Schopenhauer  is  always 
an  idealist  in  the  sense  that  he  believes  that  reality  is  not 
always  just  what  it  seems  to  be.  As  we  read  him,  wc  are  at 
least  undeceived  about  the  "  controlling  position  of  the  reality 
of  common  experience."  " '  The  world  is  my  idea ' :  this  is  a 
truth  which  holds  good  for  everything  that  lives  and  knows, 
though  man  alone  can  bring  it  into  reflective  and  abstract 
consciousness."  ^  Schopenhauer  thus  assumes  the  truth  of 
what  is  commonly  called  subjective  idealism  at  the  outset. 
To  many  this  may  seem  folly,  but  subjective  idealism  is  a 
very  small  thing  indeed  for  Schopenhauer,  the  "  merest  piece  of 
philosophical  truism."  "  '  The  world  is  my  idea '  is,  like  the 
axioms  of  Euclid,  a  proposition  which  every  one  must  recog- 
nise as  true  as  soon  as  he  understands  it ;  although  it  is 
not  a  proposition  that  every  one  understands  as  soon  as  he 
hears  it.  To  have  brought  this  proposition  to  clear  conscious- 
ness, and  in  it  the  problem  of  the  relation  of  the  ideal  and  the 
real — i.e.,  of  the  world  in  the  head  to  the  world  outside  the 
head,  together  with  the  problem  of  moral  freedom — is  the  dis- 
tinctive feature  of  modern  philosophy."  ^ 

Schopenhauer  faces  the  problem  of  idealism  under  what 
he  considers  to  be  its  two  aspects,  the  empirical  and  the 
transcendental.     In  reality,  he  says,  the  only  serious  kind  of 

'  See  the  quotation  at  the  head  of  this  chapter. 

2  World  as  Will ;  H.  and  K.,  ii.  164.     Werke,  iii.  4. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  67 

idealism  is  the  transcendental.  Empirical  idealism  to  him 
means  any  of  the  ordinary  ways  of  looking  at  the  reality  of 
the  so-called  external  world,  by  which  its  reality  is  shown  to 
be  only  apparent  and  not  absolute.  Subjective  idealism,  for 
example,  is  only  a  variety  of  empirical  idealism.  Transcen- 
dental idealism  is  the  theory  that  the  world  of  the  senses, 
although  real  enough  for  all  practical  purposes,  has  no  exist- 
ence on  its  own  account,  seeing  that  the  only  absolute  reality 
in  the  world  is  the  will  and  its  "  immediate  "  objectification 
(the  world  of  the  Platonic  Ideas).  Sometimes  3chopenhauer 
talks  as  if  the  will  existed  before  the  Platonic  Ideas,  but  the 
general  trend  of  his  system  is  to  the  effect  that  the  "  univer- 
sal "  (the  will)  and  the  "  forms  "  of  its  manifestation  (the ' 
Platonic  Ideas)  constitute  the  full  reality  of  the  universe. 

It  ought  to  be  said  that  in  Schopenhauer's  thought  sub- 
jective idealism  passes  very  easily  over  into  empirical  or 
phenomenal  idealism,  and  phenomenal  idealism  into  tran- 
scendental idealism.  Schopenhauer's  own  theory  might  be 
called,  and  is  called  by  himself,  either  transcendental  idealism 
or  transcendental  realism.  It  is  transcendental  because  it 
places  the  reality  of  things  in  something  that  transcends  the 
ordinary  real ;  it  is  idealism  because  it  regards  ordinary 
things  as  phenomenal ;  it  is  realism  because  it  offers  a  con- 
struction of  the  world  from  an  ultimate  principle  (will)  which 
(unlike  the  "Idea")  is  a  real  thing — the  only  real  thing, 
in  fact.  Schopenhauer  in  this  same  connection  talks  of  his 
philosophy  as  immanent  dogmatism.  "  My  system  might 
be  characterised  immanent  dogmatism,  since  its  doctrines 
although  dogmatic  do  not  transcend  the  world  of  experience, 
but  merely  explain  what  the  latter  is  by  analysing  it  into 
its  ultimate  elements."  ^  Although  this  description  of  his 
doctrine  by  himself  seems  to  claim  for  it  a  realistic  rather 
than  a  transcendental   character,  the   fact  remains   that   his 

'  Schop.,  Werke,  v.  141 :  "Bemerk.  ii.  meine  eigene  Philosophie." 


68  Schopenhauer's  system. 

"  will "  is  in  the  end  just  as  transcendental  as  Spinoza's 
"  substance  " ;  it  may  be  a  more  real  kind  of  abstraction,  but 
it  is  still  an  abstraction. 

Each  of  these  points  of  view  will  afford  us  material  for 
study  and  criticism.  In  spite  of  the  difficulties  of  transcen- 
dentalism, Schopenhauer's  system  offers  most  contributions 
to  philosophy  from  this  third  point  of  view.  As  to  em- 
pirical idealism,  it  is  that  which  practically  gives  to  Schopen- 
hauer the  problem  of  philosophy,  and  we  see  how  most  of  his 
difficulties  arise  from  his  initial  acceptance  of  the  various 
positions  of  idealism  about  reality  and  about  the  different 
kinds  of  reality.  He  means  by  empirical  idealism  the  theory 
that  the  world  is  partly  phenomenon  and  partly  thing  in 
itself.  The  phenomenal  world  he  calls  the  world  as  idea 
(the  world  that  is  revealed  to  us  by  our  intellectual  faculties), 
and  the  noumenal  or  supra-sensuous  world  he  calls  the  world 
as  will  (the  world  that  is  revealed  to  us  by  our  conscious- 
ness of  effort  and  volition).  The  world  we  live  in  he  takes 
to  be  a  sort  of  plexus  of  the  idea  and  the  will,^  The  diflticulty 
of  his  pliilosophy  from  this  point  of  view  arises  from  the 
fact  (as  he  takes  it  to  be)  that  we  hwiv  the  first  world,  the 
phenomenal  world,  the  world  of  the  intellect ;  but  that  we  do 
not  know  the  second,  the  world  of  the  will,  but  only  realise  it 
somehow,  feel  it,  will  it. 

Subjective  idealism  we  shall  in  the  first  instance  study 
as  that  which  helped  Schopenhauer  on  to  ordinary  dogmatic 
idealism,  and  then  (but  later  in  the  volume),  first,  as  the 
theoretical  idealism  which  ever  and  again  makes  the  reality 
of  the  whole  world  seem  to  depend  upon  the  reality  of  the 
self,  and  is  thus  responsible  for  that  aspect  of  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  in  which  it  seems  to  be  an  ill-adjusted   balance 

^  It  is  easy  to  put  meaning  into  this  conception  if  we  simply  remember  that  events 
and  thoughts,  unconscious  happenings  and  conscious  reflections,  make  up  the  world 
that  we  know  and  live  in. 


SCHOPENHAUER  AND   IDEALISM.  69 

between  subjective  idealism  and  nihilism ;  and  secondly,  as 
the  true  reason  for  the  extreme  selfishness  attributed  by 
Schopenhauer  to  the  natural  man. 

Transcendental  idealism  is  not  quite  such  a  partial  phil- 
osophy as  the  first  or  the  second  kind  of  idealism ;  it  grades 
the  world  into  different  spheres  of  reality,  and  teaches  us  that 
a  lower  sphere  of  reality  is  always  less  real  than  a  higher  sphere, 
and  that  the  highest  grade  of  the  assertion  of  the  will  is  the 
highest  kind  of  reality.  The  difficulty  of  Schopenhauer's  phil- 
osophy is  that  all  these  three  idealisms  are  woven  into  and 
through  each  other  and  the  system,  and  that  Schopenhauer 
himself  drops  now  into  the  one  and  now  into  the  other,  and 
then  again  generalises  perhaps  on  the  strength  of  all  three 
taken  together.  The  whole  system  is  a  professed  search  after 
what  is  truly  real,  in  the  face  of  what  is  confessedly  ideal  or 
phenomenal. 

I.  It  is  the  idea  of  introspection  or  self-consciousness  that 
ODens  the  door  of  philosophy  to  Schopenhauer,  as  it  does  to 
most  other  modern  philosophers.  In  reading  Schopenhauer 
one  gets  the  impression  that  he  really  thought  there  was  a 
manifest  amount  of  residual  fact  about  the  doctrine  of  subjective 
idealism,  whatever  might  be  thought  about  the  whole  line  of 
thought  from  Berkeley  to  Kant  which  had  narrowed  down  the 
world  to  be  merely  a  phenomenon  of  the  self.  By  a  long 
process  of  thought  philosophers  had  resolved  the  world  into 
what  they  called  phenomenon  or  appearance,  which,  so  far  as 
its  matter  was  concerned,  consisted  simply  of  sensations  or  per- 
ceptions of  the  subject,  and,  so  far  as  its  form  was  concerned, 
was  the  work  of  the  elaborative  or  constructive  activity  of 
the  intellect.  The  merest  inspection  of  the  "  self,"  moreover, 
seemed  to  reveal  to  the  observer,  as  it  did  to  Hume,  that  the 
self  was  simply  a  bundle  of  mental  states ;  the  consciousness 
of  a  mental  state  seemed  to  be  the  most  immediately  given 


70  Schopenhauer's  system. 

aud  the  only  incontestable  fact  of  the  universe.     The  idea  of 
the  conscious  self,  the  "  self  with  a  mental  representation,"  lay 
in  Schopenhauer's  mind  behind  the  idea  of  "the  world  as 
phenomenon."     It  is  with  this  notion  that  we  find  him  busied 
at  the  outset,  if  we  seek  to  analyse  his  philosophy  into  its 
simplest  beginnings.     And  this  is,  as  it  were,  the  first  plane  of 
idealism,  the  incontestable  amount  of  residual  fact  on  which 
its  edifice  reposes.     The  simplest  or  the  most  ultimate  thing 
in  the  world  to  Schopenhauer  as  an  idealist  is  the  "  self  with  a 
mental  representation."     The  philosophical  student  is  supposed 
by  Schopenhauer  to  be  familiar  with  the  line  of  thought  which 
leads  one  to  the  Cartesian  assertion,  Cogito  ergo  sum.     "  We 
.start  neither  from  the  object  nor  from  the  subject,  but  from 
the  idea  as  the  first  fact  of  consciousness,"  i  says  Schopenhauer. 
His  philosophy  is  an  attempt  to  analyse  that  fact  of  conscious- 
ness so  as  to  set  forth  the  whole  world  of  thought  and  being  as 
resting  upon  it.     He  began  here  and  thus,  although  his  phil- 
osophy and  the  line  of  thought  it  opens  up  cause  the  mind 
definitely  to   abandon  this  very  one-sided  way  of  thinking. 
Biology   and   experience    are    both    against   the   tendency  to 
regard  the  mere  individual  consciousness  as  the  last  element 
of  fact  in  the  universe.     So  too  is  Kant,  who,  as  we  know, 
was  extremely  annoyed  at  some  interpretations  of  his  system 
which  assimilated  it  to  subjective  idealism.     We  may  defend 
Schopenhauer  by  saying  that  of  course  philosophy  may  begin 
anywhere,  and  that  the  self   is  a  very  good  starting-point; 
but  he  is  not  free  from   the   fallacy  of  modern   philosophy, 
the  fallacy  of  taking  the  metaphysical  truism  that  all  thing? 
and   all  thoughts  are   ultimately  things  and  thoughts  for  a 
knowing    subject    as    equivalent    to    the    proved    statement 
that  the  self   is  first  and  foremost  a  being  that  knovjs  and 
that   presents   "itself    to   itself"  in    knowledge    or   in    self- 
knowledge. 

1  World  as  Will,  H.  and  K.,  i.  U. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  7l 

From  the  point  of  view  of  subjective  idealism,  however, 
there  arose  for  Schopenhauer  one  or  two  problems.  It  is  a 
strange  fact  that  human  nature  has  never  been  able  to  content 
itself  with  the  view  of  the  idealist  about  the  self  as  primarily 
a  being  which  "  knows  its  own  states."  And  this  discontent  is 
reflected  in  Schopenhauer.  For  him  the  ultimate  datum  of  ex- 
perience at  the  outset  of  his  thinking  is  undoubtedly  the  self 
with  the  mental  phenomenon  or  state ;  and  his  ultimate  effort 
is  to  find  out  wherein  the  reality  of  such  a  self  consists.  His 
philosophy  can  be  regarded  as  a  search  after  the  reality  of  the 
self.  What  turns  out  to  be  the  root  of  the  self  will  natu-ally 
be  the  root  of  everything  else  if  the  self  is  the  most  real  of  all 
things.  There  is  this  much  reason  for  thinking  of  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy  in  connection  with  subjective  idealism.  It 
suffers,  no  doubt,  from  the  connection.  It  suffers  in  the  first 
instance  the  fate  of  ordinary  solipsism.  It  meets  with  com- 
plete incredulity.  The  ordinary  mind  never  has  believed  that 
the  world  is  only  an  idea  in  the  mind  of  the  person  who  is 
for  the  time  thinking.  "No  wonder,"  men  feel,  "Schopen- 
hauer's system  leads  to  pessimism ;  for  if  the  world  is  only  an 
'idea  in  my  mind,'  or  even  in  the  mind  of  the  human  race 
or  of  Cod,  it  is  for  all  practical  purposes  a  world  of  illusion ! " 
And  it  is  true  that  the  words  "  all  is  nugatory,"  "  all  is  vain," 
"  all  is  seeming,"  may  be  written  as  a  text  over  every  page  of 
Schopenhauer's  writings.  The  system  retains  to  the  end  an 
illusory  character  which  is  bred  of  its  erroneous  initial  accept- 
ance of  subjective  idealism.  Every  aspect  of  Schopenhauer's 
system  is  a  persistent  aspect,  and  so  the  whole  wears  the 
aspect  of  being  a  web  or  tissue  of  confusions  and  contradic- 
tious. It  has  been  thought  "  to  mirror "  all  the  features  of, 
and  all  the  confusions  incident  to,  the  "  erroneous  idealistic- 
Spinozistic  philosophy."^  "We  notice,  however,  not  only  the 
persistence  of    subjective   idealism  in   Schopenhauer,  but  its 

^  Ueberweg,  History  of  Philos.,  ii.  256,  notes. 


72  Schopenhauer's  system. 

breaking  down  altogether  and  its  being  transformed  into  what 
seemed  to  suggest  itself  to  him  as  a  substitute  for  it.  In 
Schopenhauer  the  world  as  idea  is  resolved  into  the  world  as 
will,  and  this  again  is  a  fresh  source  of  confusion.  Neither 
the  idea  nor  the  will  completely  gains  the  victory  in  Schopen- 
liauer  so  far  as  the  main  body  of  his  work  goes.  The  idea 
does  prevail  to  this  extent  that  a  man  who  conquers  the  world 
in  his  thought  is  made  out  by  Schopenhauer  to  conquer  the 
world  in  reality.  But  then  the  will  in  turn  becomes  supreme, 
for  it  is  said  to  be  eternal,  and  the  idea  is  said  to  represent 
only  the  world  as  it  appears  to  the  intellect. 

There  is  some  value  in  Schopenhauer's  idea  of  the  individual 
practically  negating  the  world  for  himself  in  his  thought. 
This  will  be  seen  when  we  deal  with  his  views  upon  religion. 
But  the  negation  of  the  personality  in  thought  is  not  the 
negation  of  the  personality  in  reality,  because  the  reality  of 
the  personality  consists  in  will.  If  the  individual  really 
ceased  to  will,  the  world  practically  would  cease  to  exist  for 
him.  And  there  seems  to  be  a  certain  argument  by  analogy 
in  Schopenhauer  in  consequence  of  which  the  world  seems  to 
depend  on  the  will  of  the  individual,  just  as  according  to 
idealism  the  world  is  made  to  depend  somehow  on  the  idea 
of  the  individual.  Anyhow,  it  is  true  that  idealism  in  Scho- 
penhauer leads  to  illusionism,  and  that  illusionism  leads  to 
nihilism,  and  that  idealism  and  illusionism  and  nihilism  are 
hopelessly  mixed  together  in  Schopenhauer.  The  individual  is 
at  once  the  creature  of  the  world- will,  and  yet  able  in  his  own 
personal  will  or  intellect  to  negate  and  abolish  the  world. 

From  thinking  of  the  subject  or  self  as  that  to  which 
phenomena  appear,  Schopenhauer  went  on  to  think  of  it  as 
merely  a  "form  of  knowledge."  This  is  a  most  fallacious 
and  dangerous  piece  of  dialectic.  The  philosopher,  we  may 
allow  for  the  sake  of  argument,  studies  "  knowledge,"  studies 
the  world  as  a  "  known  world."     Now   the   form   of   know- 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  73 

ledge,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  is  "subject  and  object," 
a  "  category  under  which  "  knowledge  or  whatever  is  know- 
able  "  appears."  Thus,  from  thinking  of  knowledge  as  show- 
ing us  "  phenomena,"  Schopenhauer  fell  into  the  error  of 
thinking  of  knoivledgc  and  even  of  the  subject  or  the  self  as 
phenomenal.  That  is,  knowledge  comes  to  be  for  him  merely 
something  that  "  appears,"  something  "  phenomenal,"  and  with 
hiowledgc  becoming  a  mere  "  phenomenon,"  the  subject  of  know- 
ledge, the  self,  became  a  mere  phenomenon.  There  is  no  doubt 
that  his  system  wears  the  appearance  of  a  kind  of  universal 
illusionism  (pan-illusionism)  in  which  the  "  object "  and  the 
"  subject "  and  "  knowledge "  all  serve  in  turn  as  the  mere 
"  phenomena  "  of  one  another,  and  of  the  unknown  thing  (the 
will)  which  is  at  the  root  of  everything.  From  this  pan- 
illusionism  Schopenhauer  felt  he  must  somehow  escape.  If 
knowledge  seems  to  make  everything  phenomenal,  the  world 
must  be  something  other  than  what  mere  knowledge  reveals 
it  to  be.  And  the  self  too  must  be  something  other  than 
mere  "  representation  "  or  the  mere  power  of  mental  "  repre- 
sentation." What,  then,  is  the  world  besides  a  phenomenon 
of  the  subject  ?  And  what  is  the  self  besides  mere  power  of 
knowing  or  presenting  things  to  us  ?  Schopenhauer  roundly 
accuses  all  philosophy  which  has  used  the  self  as  a  key  to 
things  (materialism  absurdly  tries  to  explain  the  self  by 
things,  and  is  therefore  hardly  a  philosophy  at  all)  of  hav- 
ing used  the  knowing  self,  the  intellectual  self,  the  Cogito, 
as  its  principle  of  interpretation.  The  knowing  self,  he  says, 
is  not  the  key  to  reality,  but  rather  the  willing  self.  "  We 
have  just  seen,"  he  would  say,  "the  illusionism  into  which 
we  are  apt  to  fall  if  we  regard  knowledge  as  the  gate  to 
the  understanding  of  things :  knowledge  simply  makes  every- 
thing seem  a  phenomenon  of  everything  else."  Now,  is  not 
what  Schopenhauer  here  asserts  of  most  intellectual  philo- 
sophy true  ?     It  would  certainly  be  rash  to  deny  it  of  much 


74  Schopenhauer's  system. 

post-Kantian  philosophy.  Both  Schelling  and  Hegel  in  at- 
tempting to  set  forth  the  meaning  of  things  deal  chiefly 
with  the  knowing  self ;  and  in  both  these  thinkers  we  are 
at  times  baffled  with  a  kind  of  phenomenalism  in  which 
everything  seems  merely  relative  to  everything  else. 

But  Schopenhauer  himself  was  wrong  in  thinking  that  the 
teaching  of  the  idealists  about  the  self  was  inevitable  and 
ultimate.  He  did  in  a  sense  regard  it  as  proved  that  know- 
ledge or  the  faculty  of  representation  was  of  the  essence  of 
the  self,  although  he  thought  it  to  be  his  own  duty  to  find  out 
"  something  more  "  about  the  self — about  its  real  nature  as 
something  more  fundamental  than  its  mere  power  of  hnoioing 
things.  It  is  true  that  speculation  had  to  a  large  extent 
tended  to  make  people  think  of  the  intellectual  self  as  the 
only  self.  In  so  far  as  it  had  done  so,  Schopenhauer  may  be 
said  to  have  recalled  philosophy  from  the  study  of  ideas  to 
the  study  of  actions.  But  the  significance  of  his  recall  is 
not  seen  merely  in  the  suggestion  that  there  is  volition  as 
well  as  intellection  in  the  self.  Any  one  might  have  known 
that  the  expressions  "  subject "  and  "  self "  were  not  synony- 
mous, but  that  the  latter  covers  the  former,  and  that  instead 
of  thinking  of  the  subject  or  the  self  as  a  mero  form  of  know- 
ledge, we  might  rather  think  of  "  knowledga "  as  one  of  the 
forms  or  activities  of  the  self  (the  complete  subject).  There 
is  another  thing  that  has  to  be  remembered  about  the  nature 
of  the  self.  The  self  has  not  merely  been  called  the  subject ; 
it  hps  also  been  said  to  be  simply  the  human  lody.  Spinoza, 
for  example,  always  thought  of  the  self  as  meaning,  to  some 
extent,  simply  a  particular  body,  or  the  idea  of  the  body. 
Throughout  his  philosophy  Schopenhauer  argues  just  as  much 
from  the  idea  of  the  self  as  the  body,  as  he  does  from  the 
idea  of  the  self  as  conscious  mental  representation.  He  is 
certainly,  again,  in  virtue  of  this  fact,  an  inconsistent  idealist ; 
but  one  of  the  things  we  desire  throughout  our  study  of  Scho- 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  75 

penhauer  to  insist  upon  is  that  no  mere  idealism  can  ever  he 
a  consistent  philosophy  of  reality.  There  is  always  indeed  a 
certain  amount  of  ideaHsm  about  the  attempt  to  interpret 
the  world  from  the  standpoint  of  the  self,  whether  the  self  is 
regarded  as  the  body  or  as  the  intellect.  That  is,  even  if  we 
say  that  we  know  things  and  animals  only  through  our  own 
body,  or  through  what  in  us  is  akin  to  them,  we  are  falling 
into  an  idealistic  or  hypothetical  way  of  looking  at  reality. 
But  to  return.  However  the  view  of  the  self  as  the  body 
is  attained  to,  whether  by  resorting  to  common-sense  or  to 
science,  it  is  still  a  relatively  justifiable  view  of  the  matter ; 
and  it  is  a  merit  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  that  his 
account  of  things  does  not  exclude  the  positive  truth  that 
may  be  found  either  in  the  idealist's  view  of  the  self  (as  the 
intellect)  or  in  the  materialist's  viev/  of  the  self  (as  the  body). 
AVe  shall  have  to  see  how  the  view  of  the  self  as  impulse 
or  effort  comprehends  the  relative  truth  of  both  idealism  and 
materialism.^  The  idealist  maintains  that  the  essence  of  the 
self  consists  in  self-consciousness,  and  the  materialist,  on  the 
contrary,  in  the  preservation  of  the  individual  organism  or  the 
transmission  of  its  life  to  other  organisn  ',  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  enables  us  to  a  certain  extent  to  correlate  both 
views  of  the  matter.  He  always  talks  of  the  intellect  and 
the  consciousness  of  man  as  merely  an  accompaniment  of  his 
total  organic  life.  It  is  true  he  tends  to  think  of  bodily  im- 
pulse as  blind  and  unintelligent,  and  as  totally  different  from 
consciousness ;  but  his  philosophy  ends  in  a  desperate  attempt 
to  make  the  higher  "  Ideas  "  of  art  and  religion  and  ethics 
actually  penetrate  and  transform  the  whole  life  of  man.  In 
the  meantime,  however,  it  is  sufficient  to  state  that  Schopen- 
hauer was  not  wrong  in  going  beyond  the  view  of  the  self  as 
mere  consciousness  or  "  mental  representation."  Only  he  was 
wrong  in  retaining  it  even  as  the  starting-point  of  philosophy. 

*  Cf.  chaps,  v.,  vi.,  vii.,  viii. 


76  Schopenhauer's  system. 

The  cogito  ergo  sum  point  of  view  about  things  is  good  enough 
to  stimulate  beginners  in  philosophy  to  reflection,  but  it  should 
never  be  put  forward  by  philosophers  as  representing  terra 
firma  either  in  psychology  or  in  speculation.  One  has  only 
to  read  the  history  of  Eomanticism  in  German  literature,  and 
some  of  Fichte's  and  Schelling's  philosophising  about  the  empty 
form  of  the  self,  to  see  how  a  merely  formal  view  of  the  self 
and  of  its  latent  possibili'-ieG  may  end  in  the  most  capricious 
and  unreal  sort  of  thinking  and  writing.  The  bitterness  and 
the  rude  force  of  Schopenhauer's  tirades  against  metaphysical 
idealism  are  probably  to  be  traced  to  the  fact  that  he  was 
deceived  at  the  outset  into  believing  it  to  be  a  really  inevitable 
view  of  things  for  the  philosophical  mind.  We  shall  suggest 
below  that  it  is  far  from  being  that ;  and  Schopenhauer  teaches 
us  this  too,  even  although  he  himself  began  with  that  view. 

It  was  natural  enough  for  Schopenhauer  to  think  that 
idealism  represented  the  first  lesson  one  has  to  learn  in 
philosophy.  Kant  had  made  knowledge  the  prominent 
thing  about  the  self  in  philosophy.  A'pperception,  or  the 
reference  of  any  fact  whatsoever  (mental  or  physical)  to  one's 
total  mental  consciousness,  came  to  be  the  leading  idea  in 
philosophy  after  Kant,  and  Schopenhauer  learned  philosophy 
from  Kant.  Apperception  is  in  fact  the  greatest  single 
idea  in  Kant's  philosophy,  and  it  has  had  more  influence  in 
psychology  and  philosophy  than  any  other  idea  for  the  last 
hundred  years.  It  was  a  powerful  idea,  because  it  repre- 
sented an  ultimate  fact  about  the  human  mind,  about  the 
psychical  constitution  of  any  living  being.  In  metaphysical 
language  apperception  means  that  nothing  can  be  said  to  exist 
for  the  mind  at  all,  or  for  any  psychical  subject,  except  in  so 
far  as  that  thing  can  enter  into  some  vital  relation  to  our 
consciousness.  If  the  Hegelian  philosophy  has  any  ultimate 
hold  upon  the  human  mind,  it  has  such  a  hold  just  for  the 


SCHOPENHAUER    AND    IDEALISM.  77 

reason  that  it  has  proclaimed  perhaps  more  strongly  than  any 
other  body  of  thought,  the  fact  that  nothing  can  he  said  to 
exist  for  man  which  docs  not  somchoio  enter  into  vital,  or  living 
and  internal,  relations  to  his  personality.  But  then  appercep- 
tion has  certain  physiological  and  biological  as  well  as  psychical 
aspects.  It  is  a  physiological  fact  as  well  as  a  psychological 
fact.  It  represents  the  organic  recognition  by  all  animal 
beings  possessed  of  higher  nervous  centres  of  what  is  called 
external  stimulus  or  sensation,  and  the  organic  redistribution 
of  psychical  and  physical  energy  which  is  consequent  on  such 
recognition.  Wundt,  for  example,  makes  out  will,  so  far  as  it 
is  a  power  of  control  over  the  self  emanating  from  within  out- 
wards, to  be  essentially  a  form  of  apperception.^  Kant  did 
not  look  at  apperception  in  this  comprehensive  way.  Yet 
this  is  exactly  what  we  must  try  to  do  in  studying  Schopen- 
hauer. For  about  fifty  years  after  Kant — roughly  speaking, 
from  Kant's  death  to  Schelling's  death — it  was  chiefly  the 
upper  limits  of  apperception — consciousness  and  self -con- 
sciousness— that  were  studied  by  philosophers.  The  lower 
limits  of  apperception  —  organic  reaction  to  stimulus  and 
organic  adaptation  to  environment — have  been  studied  by 
psychologists  and  physiologists  from  about  the  early  forties 
until  the  present  time.  One  of  the  first  influences  in  that 
direction  was  the  philosophy  of  Herbart.  Now  Schopenhauer 
must  have  been  familiar  with  ail  the  discussion  incident  to 
the  introduction  of  the  idea  of  apperception  into  philosophy. 
It  was  his  destiny,  also,  to  compel  philosophers  to  work  out 
the  idea  not  so  much  from  the  side  of  mental  comprehen- 

^  Physiologisclie  Psychologie,  passim,  and  especially  chap.  xx.  (in  vol.  ii.),  Der 
Wille,  c.f/.  s.  471,  "class  die  iiussere  Willenshaudlung  ihrem  urspriiuglichen  Wesen 
nach  nichts  anderes  ist  als  eine  specielle  Form  der  Apperception,  u.s.w."  The 
outcome  of  the  inve'^tigations  of  llibot  and  Schneider  is  substantially  in  agreement 
with  Wundt.  For  an  interesting  and  careful  account  of  the  diflerent  theories  of 
volition  from  Herbart  and  Drobisch  to  Wundt  and  Miinsterberg,  see  '  Die  Lehre 
vom  Willen  in  der  neueren  Psychologie,'  by  Dr  0.  Kiilpe,  Leipzig,  1888. 


75  Schopenhauer's  system. 

sion  and  jr.Jgment — Kant  had  done  that — as  from  the  side 
of  the  motor  impulse  that  is  exemplified  in  volition,  when 
volition  arrives  "at  the  object  aimed  at"  (hits  its  mark,  as 
it  were) — that  is  to  say,  from  the  side  of  physiology  and 
biology.  But  in  spite  of  both  these  things  the  letter  of 
his  system  shows  that  he  himself  thought  of  apperception 
primarily  in  an  intellectual  regard — i.e.,  he  thought  of  the 
self  as  the  "  power  (-i  having  representations,"  of  representing 
things,  or  simply  as  th<3  central  point  to  which  the  "  world  as 
phenomenon  "  could  be  referred. 

Still  his  mind  could  not  rest  satisfied  with  the  idea  of 
the  self  as  only  a  being  which  knows  or  has  representations, 
however  important  such  an  idea  undoubtedly  is  for  the  pur- 
poses of  metaphysic  and  logic.  He  could  not  think  that  the 
ultimate  reality  of  the  self  (the  self  which  was,  according  to 
the  idealists,  the  confessed  support  of  the  whole  world  as  phe- 
nomenon) lay  simply  in  its  power  to  "  represent "  things,  to 
reveal  phenomena  or  mental  states  to  consciousness.  If  we 
say  that  the  essence  of  things  consists  in  being  known,  and 
that  their  reality  is  therefore  a  borrowed  reality,  dependent 
upon  the  reality  of  the  self  which  knows  them,  may  not  the 
reality  of  the  self,  as  merely  that  which  knows,  be  also  a 
borrowed  reality  ?  Knowing  simply  means  being  conscious  of 
certain  mental  appearances,  and  appearances  are  in  a  sense 
illusory.  Schopenhauer,  that  is,  could  not  satisfy  his  mind 
with  the  results  of  idealism  just  because  he  believed  that  it 
meant  reducing  in  this  way  the  world  into  terms  of  mere 
knowledge — i.e.,  into  a  sort  of  pan -phenomenalism.  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  knowledge  does  not  reduce  the  world  into 
terms  of  mere  knowledge,  and  this  for  reasons  which  Schopen- 
hauer himself  will  point  out  to  us,  the  chief  cf  these  being  the 
fact  that  knowledge  does  not  tell  us  much  about  things,  save  in 
so  far  as  they  affect  our  will.  Schopenhauer  was  wrong  in 
thinking  that  the   knowing  of  things  phenomenalised  them 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  79 

and  rendered  them  illusory.  No  doubt  if  we  allow  our  con- 
sciousness to  dwell  for  any  length  of  time  on  the  thought  of 
our  mere  knowledge  of  anything, — if  we  try  to  think  of  know- 
ledge in  and  for  itself, — we  shall  gradually  experience  the 
feeling  that  a  veil  of  illusion  {Maya  according  to  both 
Schopenhauer  and  Buddhism)  is  spreading  itself  out  over 
our  whole  mental  horizon.  But  then  knowledge  is  not  a 
thing  in  itself, — not  a  thing,  in  fact,  that  we  can  study  by 
itself.  Knowledge  is  that  part  of  our  sense  for  reality  which 
rises  above  the  threshold  of  our  consciousness.  Our  total 
cganic  and  only  half  -  conscious  sense  for  reality  is  far 
greater  and  broader  than  our  mere  conceptual  knowledge 
01  reality.  And  such  a  sense  makes  us  realise  not  only  that 
our  sole  knowledge  of  things  is  our  consciousness  (implicit 
and  explicit)  of  their  relation  to  our  activity  (will),  but  also 
that  the  reality  of  things,  like  our  own  reality,  consists  in 
will.  Hence  the  philosophy  of  will  (thought  out  to  its  con- 
sequences) surmounts  the  difficulties  not  only  of  idealism,  but 
also  of  the  half-philosophy  {relativity),  which  says  that  the 
reality  of  things  consists  in  their  relation  <o— -us.  It  is  the 
will  side  of  things  that  we  know:  and  the  reality  of  things 
consists  in  will  or  function.     But  of  this  again. 

Another  problem  that  exercised  Schopenhauer's  mind  in 
connection  with  the  subject  of  idealism  was  to  find  a  bridge 
between  the  subjective  and  objective  elements  in  experience, 
between  the  self  and  the  world.  It  may  be  said  by  way  of 
comment  on  this,  that  the  very  fact  of  Schopenhauer's  seeking 
a  bridge  between  the  subjective  and  the  objective  again 
proves  that  he  was  not  a  consistent  idealist.  The  fact  of 
his  not  being  a  consistent  idealist  frees  us  from  the  necessity 
of  trying  to  state  definitely  what  he  understood  by  subjective 
idealism.  Vtj  simply  pointing  out  some  of  the  difficulties 
mto  which  subjective  idealism  led  Schopenhauer,  we  of  course 


80  Schopenhauer's  system. 

raise  several  presumptions  against  the  truth  of  subjective 
idealism  as  an  account  of  the  facts  of  experience.  Schopen- 
hauer, however,  was  strong  enough  to  free  himself  from  the 
trammels  of  any  one  way  of  looking  at  the  philosophical 
problem.  His  inconsistency,  as  it  were,  is  a  merit.  It  is,  in 
fact,  one  of  his  great  merits,  that  he  cared  so  little  about  the 
mere  surface  consistency  of  his  system.  To  resume — how  can 
the  subjective  idealist  account  for  the  fact  that  we  have  the 
impression  or  the  idea  that  we  have  a  knowledge  of  things 
outside  ourselves  or  outside  our  own  bodies  ?  Schopenhauer 
asks  this.  "  The  subjective  and  objective  do  not  constitute  a 
continuous  whole.  That  of  which  W3  are  immediately  con- 
scious is  bounded  by  the  skin,  or  rather  by  the  extreme 
ends  of  the  nerves  which  proceed  from  the  cerebral  system. 
Beyond  this  there  lies  a  world  of  which  we  have  no  know- 
ledge except  through  pictures  in  our  head."  ^  As  the  Vor- 
stcllurifj  or  mental  representation  then  (Locke's  "  idea  ")  is  the 
first  fact  of  consciousness  to  Schopenhauer,  he  has  to  account 
for  our  belief  that  we  know  external  reality,  or  for  the  fact 
that  we  think  we  know  it.  If  we  know  only  what  is  in  the 
mind,  how  can  we  ever  know,  as  we  do  know,  what  is  alleged 
to  be  outside  it  ?     Two  remarks  need  to  be  made  about  this. 

In  the  first  place  (and  this  is  a  mere  technical  point),  there 
are  in  Schopenhauer  all  the  confusions  incident  to  the  attempt 
to  pass  from  the  isolated  or  particular  sensation  to  things  or  to 
the  world.  These  confusions  are  present  in  him  in  pretty 
much  the  same  sort  of  way  that  they  are  present  in  Kant, 
and  his  attempts  at  their  solution  are  pretty  much  the  same 
as  Kant's  attempts.  This  point  may  be  allowed  to  rest  with 
the  mere  statement  that,  strictly  speaking,  it  is  not  true 
that  the  first  thing  in  consciousness  is  the  sensation  or  the 
mental  representation.  And  even  if  Schopenhauer  sometimes 
argues  as  if  the  isolated  sensation  were  the  first  thing  in  con- 

1  Welt  als  Wille,  ii.  12  ;  H.  and  K.,  ii.  173.     . 


SCHOPENHAUER    AND    IDEALISM.  81 

sciousness,  his  philosophy  of  will  rests  upon  the  fact  that  the 
earliest  thing  in  consciousness  is  impulse — the  mere  setisa- 
tion-impiilsc  possibly,  but  still  impulse  (nascent  volition).  Or- 
ganic sensations  precede  ideas  in  consciousness,  and  man  is 
first  and  foremost  a  being  who  is  striving  after  life ;  and  in 
his  struggle  after  life  he  does  not  begin  with  such  a  secondary 
thing  as  knowledge.  Then,  secondly,  while  it  is  true  that  in 
a  metaphysical  or  ultimate  regard  the  most  important  fact 
about  man  is  simply  knowledge,  his  power  of  "  presenting 
himself  to  himself  "  in  his  thought,  we  must  never  interpret 
this  proposition  to  mean  that  the  first  thing  we  have  to  grasp 
in  philosophy  is  that  the  world  is  "  only  my  idea."  The  only 
way  of  getting  over  the  apparently  insurmountable  difliculty  of 
our  attaining  to  a  knowledge  of  what  is  objective,  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  what  we  know  is  always  subjective,  is  by  insisting 
that  the  difKculty  is  unreal  and  imaginary :  that  it  arises  only 
out  of  a  confusion  (of  which  even  Schopenhauer  himself  is 
partly  guilty)  between  the  metaphysical  and  the  psychological 
point  of  view  about  consciousness  or  knowledge ;  and  that  our 
earliest  acquaintance  with  reality — our  introduction  to  the 
world  of  reality  and  circumstance — is  not  an  affair  of  ideation 
or  speculation  but  of  volition  and  bodily  experience.  In  im- 
pulse we  know  reality  directly,  for  impulse  is  psychical  and 
physical  at  one  and  the  same  time.  It  is  the  physical  process 
or  movement  in  impulse  which  gives  us  the  sensation  of 
reality — nay,  which  is  reality.^     Thus  the  first  crude  form  in 

'  The  phenomena  of  suggestion  known  to  hypnotism  are  all  explicable  in  view 
of  the  fact  that,  in  so-called  mental  processes  (ideation,  desire,  &c.),  there  is 
movement — motor  or  "  spontaneous  "  movement.  We  are  not  warranted  by- 
experience  in  thinking  of  any  sensory  or  intellectual  apprehension  of  things 
without  the  motor  or  corporeal  or  life-preservative  movement  which  is  its  in- 
dissoluble accompaniment.  This  sensory-motor  activity,  this  energy,  is  the 
first  and  the  broadest  fact  about  human  life  as  about  all  organised  life.  The 
first  thing  about  man  is  that  he  is  will  or  energy  ;  and  it  is  this  will  or  energy 
which  constitutes  his  reality  ( Wirklichkcit),  as  it  does  that  of  all  living  beings. 
"  Daher  sagt  Aristoteles  mit  recht :  i  $ios  iv  rp  Kivi]<r(i  ivri." — Parerga — Von 
Dem,  was  Eiuer  ist. 

' -  F 


82  Schopenhauer's  system. 

whic;h  Schopenhauer  thought  of  the  opposition  between  the 
self  and  the  world  does  not  represent  the  point  of  view  from 
which  his  philosophy  must  be  studied.  It  is  of  course  still 
true  that  his  rough  acceptance  of  the  doctrine  of  subjective 
idealism  gave  his  philosophy  from  beginning  to  end  the  ap- 
pearance of  being  simply  an  attempt  to  explain  the  outer 
world  from  the  standpoint  of  our  own  subjective  states  or 
consciousness. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy  suffers  from  the  fact  that  the 
dualism  which  he  tried  to  solve  was  so  pronounced  at  the 
outset.  A  thorough  philoiSophy  has  no  right  to  regard  any 
apparent  dualism  in  things  as  more  than  simply  apparent,  and 
Schopenhauer  is  to  blame  for  attaching  so  much  importance 
to  the  distinction  between  the  subjective  and  the  objective. 
He  did  so  only  because  he  started  with  the  view  of  the  idealist 
that  the  idea  is  the  first  thing  in  consciousness.  He  ought 
to  have  started  with  the  presumption  that  the  distinction 
between  the  subjective  and  the  objective  was  not  absolute  but 
relative,  being  in  fact  a  distinction  in  things  or  in  the  world 
and  not  something  which  entitles  us  to  split  up  the  world 
into  two  halves.  His  own  philosophy  causes  us  in  the  end 
to  look  at  the  distinction  in  a  new  and  sounder  way,  in  a 
living  and  dynamic  instead  of  a  dead  and  static  way.  Still, 
because  he  started  from  the  notion  that  the  idea  was  the  first 
thing  in  consciousness,  he  himself  fell  naturally  enough  into 
the  counter-error  of  believing  that  what  lie  found  out  to  be  true 
of  the  self — will — was  really  the  first  thing  in  consciousness. 
Strictly  speaking,  neither  the  idea  nor  the  will  can  be  said 
to  be  the  ultimate  or  the  first  thing  in  man's  nature,  but 
rather  both  of  them  together,  and  tlis  idea  as  the  parallel 
accompaniment  to  the  will.  This,  however,  is  not  our  point 
just  now.  We  are  trying  to  see  how  the  notion  of  the  self 
as  will  frees  us  from  some  of  the  crudities  and  absurdities 
of  idealism,  and  how  it  puts  in  our  hands  a  better  link  of 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  83 

connection  between  man  and  the  world  than  the  mere  idea 
or  mental  representation. 

Schopenhauer  causes  us  to  change  our  point  of  view  in 
thinking  of  the  mind.  He  causes  us  to  look  at  it  more 
objectively  than  had  been  the  custom  since  the  time  of 
Descartes.  Philosophy  had  contended  that  it  was  the  essence 
of  the  mind  to  be  treated  subjectively,  seeing  that  man  was  the 
only  object  in  nature  which  was  also  a  subject — i.e.,  an  ohjed 
for  itself.  Schopenhauer  urges  in  reply  that  minds  are  also, 
as  a  student  of  Aristotle's  psychology  might  say,  natural 
objects ;  and  that  we  know  only  the  form  of  the  mind  by 
treating  it  subjectively,  and  not  the  whole  of  the  content. 
The  content  of  the  mind  is  just  as  essential  to  the  mind  as 
its  form — subjectivity ;  and  such  phenomena  as  habit  and  im- 
pulse and  reflex  action  have  to  be  studied  objectively  even 
more  than  subjectively.  We  learn  from  Schopenhauer,  then, 
that  the  difficulties  of  subjective  idealism  about  a  possible 
path  to  reality  are  largely  unreal.  That  is,  if  the  essence  of 
the  self  is  will,  will  can  be  found  everywhere,  being  present 
in  unconscious  nature  as  well  as  in  man.  And  we  learn 
this  from  him  in  spite  of  the  fact  that  he  himself  felt  com- 
pelled to  start  from  subjective  idealism.  It  is  his  unfortunate 
provisional  acceptance  of  subjective  idealism  which  gives  to 
his  philosophy  its  transcendental  character,  and  which  makes 
it  therefore  as  distasteful  to  many  minds  as  the  philosophy  of 
Schelling,  with  all  its  purely  speculative  divinations  of  the 
heart  of  reality,  and  its  talk  about  a  special  faculty  for 
philosophical  insight.  There  is  in  Schopenhauer  the  same 
tendency  as  in  Schelling  to  disclose  as  the  result  of  specula- 
tion or  reflection  or  dialectic  an  ostensibly  hidden  meaning  of 
things,  a  meaning  which  may  seem  even  to  contradict  the 
testimony  of  our  senses  and  understanding,  and  the  same 
tendency  to  glory  in  the  very  element  of  contradiction  neces- 
sarily inherent  in  a  principle  discovered  in  such  a  way,  and 


84  Schopenhauer's  system. 

in  the  semblance  of  intellectual  subtlety  which  its  disclosure 
seems  to  argue.  We  experience,  for  example,  a  shock  of 
surprise  at  being  compelled  by  Schopenhauer  rudely  to  ex- 
tricate ourselves  out  of  idealism, — to  cease  to  believe  what  (as 
he  puts  it)  all  philosophy  avows  to  be  true  of  the  world, — 
and  to  profess  to  find  terra  firma  in  a  transcendental  will, 
whose  very  existence  we  could  not  previously  have  suspected, 
as  the  reality  both  of  the  world  and  of  ourselves.  But  Schop- 
enhauer must  be  pardoned  for  the  apparently  illogical  manner 
in  which  he  seems  to  extricate  himself  from  idealism.  No 
man  can  make  an  absolutely  fresh  start  in  philosophy.  Schop- 
enhauer had  to  begin  by  using  the  philosophical  ideas  that 
were  put  into  his  hands  by  his  predecessors  and  contem- 
poraries ;  and  these  were  notions  about  the  forms  of  know- 
ledge being  the  first  things  in  the  mind,  and  the  world  being 
phenomenon  or  idea.  He  had  to  use  these  notions  as  tools 
wherewith  to  dig  his  own  philosophy  of  will  out  of  the  depths 
of  the  human  personality  and  the  physical  universe.  When 
once  we  have  read  his  '  World  as  Will  and  Idea  '  right  through, 
we  see  that  we  might  begin  in  philosophy  with  the  notion  of 
the  human  personality  as  will,  and  that  by  so  doing  we  should 
be  taking  a  natural  and  healthy  and  objective  view  of  the 
mind  or  the  soul  or  the  life-principle  there  is  in  all  organised 
matter,  as  was  suggested  at  the  beginning  of  this  paragraph. 

II.  The  idealipm,  however,  which  Schopenhauer,  on  the 
whole,  assumed  to  be  true  as  a  matter  of  fact  about  the  world, 
was  not  so  much  mere  subjective  idealism  as  "  ordinary  "  or 
"  empirical  "  idealism,  as  he  calls  it,  "  phenomenological  " 
idealism.  This  is  the  theory  that  the  world  as  a  whole  is 
partly  phenomenon  and  partly  noumenon,  partly  appearance 
and  partly  thing  in  itself.  "  The  fundamental  point  of  view  of 
idealism  is  that  everything  which  exists  for  knowledge — that 
is,   the  whole  perceptual  world  which   spreads  itself  out  in 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  85 

time  and  space  and  is  kept  together  by  the  Principle  of  Su^' 
dent  Reason — is  only  object  in  respect  of  the  subject,  only  the 
perception  of  percipient  beings,  representation,  idea,  in  fact. 
Its  being,  therefore,  is  in  no  sense  absolute  or  independent,  b'- 
only  relative  and  dependent ;  it  is,  in  short,  only  appearance 
and  not  the  thing  in  itself."  We  have  suggested  that  it  would 
be  unfair  to  regard  Schopenhauer  as  having  tried  to  pass  logi- 
cally from  subjective  idealism  to  this  empirical  or  ordinary 
idealism  of  which  we  are  writing.  A  rough  acceptance  of  the 
Cartesian- Metaphysical  or  the  Humian-Psychological  idealism 
may  have  enabled  him  to  generalise  the  idealistic  hypothesis 
as  true  of  the  world  as  a  whole,  but  it  was  rather  Berkeley 
and  Kant  together,  in  fact  the  whole  of  modern  philosophy, 
which  enabled  him  to  take  his  stand  on  "  ordinary "  or 
"  phenomenal "  idealism  as  the  first  broad  basis  of  fact  for  the 
philosopher.  We  shall  see  here  again,  as  in  the  case  of  the 
idealistic  difficulty  about  the  self,  that  it  was  really  Schopen- 
hauer's views  upon  knowledge  rather  than  anything  else  which 
made  him  th'nk  the  Idealistic  position  unassailable  as  a  state- 
ment of  fact  about  the  world.  That  is,  he  held  that  in  know- 
ledge (the  first  thing  for  the  philosopher,  according  to  the  ideas 
of  his  day)  we  are  made  aware  not  of  things  but  only  of 
phenomena,  sense  phenomena — "  phenomenal  appearances." 
We  cannot  criticise  just  now  this  view  of  knowledge.  It  will 
occupy  us  shortly  in  the  next  chapter.  It  is  intended  that 
the  whole  line  of  consideration  opened  up  in  this  volume 
should  cause  us  to  substitute  a  more  real  view  of  what  know- 
ledge is  and  does  for  man,  in  place  of  the  view  which  the 
philosophy  of  idealism  has  helped  to  spread.  Schopenhauer's 
initial  belief  about  reality  was  expressed  in  sentences  like  the 
following : — 

"  It  is  a  fundamental  philosophical  truth  that  every  object 
is  conditioned  throughout  by  the  knowing  subject,  both 
materially  in    its  objective  existence,  and    formally  in    the 


86  Schopenhauer's  system. 

mode  and  the  manner  of  its  existence,  and  so  is  only  mere 
appearance  and  not  the  thing  in  itself."  "  The  appearance 
world  (the  world  as  representation,  the  objective  world)  has 
two  poles :  the  pure  knowing  subject  and  pure  formless 
matter."  It  was  before  all  "Lhings  evident  to  Schopenhauer 
that  the  world  we  know  consists  as  a  whole  simply  of  pheno- 
menon and  not  of  thing  in  itself,  and  that  we  know  only  the 
phenomenal  aspects  and  not  the  real  aspects  of  things.  "  It  is 
perfectly  simple,"  he  virtually  says  again  and  again.  "  Locke 
stripped  the  object  of  most  of  its  qualities  and  transferred 
these  to  the  subject,  leaving  it  with  the  extended  and  the 
geometrical  and  the  physical  qualities,  of  which  our  percep- 
tions are  said  to  be  at  best  merely  the  reflex.  Then  came 
Kant,  who  showed  that  causality  was  simply  a  principle  of 
the  understanding,  and  therefore  took  the  greatest  step  in 
reducing  the  object  to  the  subject."  As  Schopenhauer  con- 
sidered causality  to  be  the  essence  of  matter,  Kant  in  his 
eyes  took  the  greatest  step  of  all  modern  philosophers.  Putting 
Locke  and  Kant  together,  Schopenhauer  gets  to  the  result 
that  both  the  matter  and  the  form  of  thought  are  of  subjec- 
tive origin,  both  the  qualities  of  material  objects  (the  actual 
"  whatness "  of  things)  and  the  principles  under  which  we 
interpret  the  connections  between  objects. 

This  idea  of  the  world  as  partly  phenomenon  and  partly 
thing  in  itself  enables  us  to  survey  his  thought  as  a  whole. 
The  intellectual  side  of  things  is  to  him  merely  phenomenal 
and  phantasmal,  merely  ideal  and  not  real ;  on  the  other  hand, 
the  volitional  side  of  things  is  substantial  and  actual,  real 
and  not  ideal.  There  is  something  healthy  in  this  thought, 
and  indeed  Schopenhauer  appeals  to  one  because  he  teaches 
throughout  all  his  writings  that  knowledge  is  a  poor  thing  at 
best,  a  kind  of  indirect  way  of  apprehending  reality,  and  that 
in  order  really  to  understand  things  one  must  feel  them,  must 
to  a  certain  extent  he  them,  energise  with  them,  or  energise 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  87 

with  the  great  cosmic  energy  that  we  call  the  world -will.  The 
Wcltseele  (that  which  philosophers  pray  to  and  beg  to  come 
into  them  and  penetrate  them  ^)  is  really  the  Welttoille  in 
Schopenhauer's  eyes — not  a  thing  that  can  be  merely  under- 
stood, but  something  that  must  be  felt  and  lived.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  the  sanest  philosophers  have  been  men  who  have 
played  an  active  part  in  life,  and  who  have  not  merely  tried 
to  think  things.  Socrates  and  Leibnitz  and  David  Hume 
and  Pascal  were  men  of  this  sort — for  was  not  Socrates  a 
soldier,  and  Leibnitz  a  diplomatist,  just  as  Hume  was  a  his- 
torian and  a  man  of  the  world,  and  Pascal  a  reformer  ?  In 
reading  Schopenhauer  we  seem  to  realise  the  fact  that  a  philo- 
sopher sees  only  that  small  part  of  the  world  which  enters 
into  his  consciousness,  and  that  our  mere  intellectual  con- 
sciousness cannot  take  in  the  pulsating  and  evolving  life  of 
the  whole  world  of  nature  and  of  history.  The  sub-conscious 
depths  of  our  personality  are  far  richer  in  content  than  the 
mere  surface  life  which  we  know  in  consciousness ;  and  these 
sub-conscious  phases  of  our  nature  are  far  better  studied  in 
children  and  the  lower  animals  than  ir  people  who  have  come 
to  the  stage  of  reflection.  It  is  habit  and  impulse  and  effort 
which  attract  Schopenhauer's  attention  most  in  his  observation 
of  human  nature. 

Yet  he  never  thinks  of  the  ultimate  meaning  of  things  as 
any  other  than  a  hidden  one.  The  student  always  finds  him 
looking  for  the  inner  meaning  of  things,  and  showing  a  con- 
tempt for  much  that  the  vulgar  and  the  uneducated  say  about 
life  out  of  their  sublime  ignorance  of  the  extent  to  which  they 
are  the  mere  slaves  of  the  world-will.  He  really  believes  that 
only  the  philosopher  and  the  man  of  science  understand  the 
world.     He  would  of  course  seek  to  draw  their  attention  to 

V  '  '  \       ..2.  - 

>  Cf.  Goethe,  '  Eins  unci  Alles '  :— 

"  Weltseelo,  koinin,  uns  zti  (lurclulringen  ! 
:  Daiiii  mit  clem  Weltgeist,"  &c.  ^         ■    .         ■'  .;•    ■  , 


88  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  things  in  life  that  are  most  important  to  generalise  from, 
but  would  still  contend  that  it  is  they  and  the  men  of  genius, 
and  not  the  vulgar,  who  understand  life.  Schopenhauer  always 
writes  as  if  there  were  mucli  that  is  illusory  in  life,  much  that 
is  not  understood  by  the  ordinary  man,  and  as  if  the  game 
of  life  were  not  always  in  favour  of  the  man  who  appears  to 
win  or  thinks  that  he  wins  it.  He  has  that  scorn  for  the 
thousand  and  one  conventions  of  life  which  pleases  the  student 
of  naturalism  and  realism.  He  goes  as  far  as  possible  in 
proclaiming  the  biological  and  the  physical  facts  of  life  to 
be  the  real  essence  and  the  real  explanation  of  conduct.  The 
metaphysic  of  life  tends  to  become  the  physiology  of  life,  and 
the  measure  of  man  is  found  in  his  brain  and  in  his  bodily 
organs ;  and  the  whole  web  of  idealistic  sentiment  and  associa- 
tion which  the  spirit  of  man  has  woven  around  his  natural 
life  seems  to  be  a  pleasing  illusion,  an  invention  of  the 
world-will  to  secvire  the  furtherance  of  its  own  ends  and  aims 
for  man.  A  useful  application,  of  course,  is  often  given  by 
Schopenhauer  to  the  distinction  between  the  illusory  and  the 
real,  the  apparent  and  the  real.  It  seems  natural,  for  in- 
stance, to  desire  to  remodel  or  vitalise  this  imperfect  world 
of  sense  and  everyday  reality,  just  because  so  much  of  it  is 
phenomenal  and  nugatory  and  illusory.  And  accordingly 
the  saint  and  the  artist  and  the  saviour  of  men  all  find 
their  place  in  Schopenhauer's  thought. 

Eead  Schopenhauer  where  one  will,  one  generally  finds  him 
making  some  use,  good  or  bad,  of  the  distinction  between 
phenomenon  and  thing  in  itself.  "  He  to  whom  men  and  all 
things  have  not  at  times  appeared  as  mere  phantoms  or  illu- 
sions has  no  capacity  for  philosophy."  He  is  always  trying 
to  give  a  deep  and  broad  and  yet  an  inward  and  true  analysis 
of  reality.  If  the  attempt  to  do  this  makes  a  man  a  philo- 
sopher, Schopenhauer  is  one.  He  has  in  him  all  the  merits 
and  all  the  defects  of  what  Eeid  calls  the  "  ideal  system,"  and 


SCHOPENHAUER  AND    IDEALISM.  89 

these  are  to  be  found  all  over  and  all  through  his  writings.^ 
It  is  the  i  cessant  harping  on  this  distinction  which  makes  his 
system  seem  to  have  at  once  a  real  and  an  illusory  hold  on 
things — to  contain  at  once  so  much  that  is  true  and  so  much 
that  is  paintully  untrue — and  which  so  fills  it  with  illusion 
that  the  sympathetic  student  feels  that  nowhere  in  it  does  he 
come  into  contact  with  reality,  "  The  Vedas  and  Puranas 
have  no  better  simile  than  a  dream  /or  the  wJiolc  knowledge  of 
the  actual  world,  which  they  call  the  web  of  Maya,  and  they 
use  iione  more  frequently.  Plato  often  says  that  men  li/e 
only  in  dream ;  the  philosopher  alone  strives  to  awake  himself. 
Pindar  says  (ii.  n.  135):  aKiag  bva^  ajdpijjirog  (umbra)  som- 
nium  homo) ;  and  Sophocles  : — 

*  Opo)  yap  yjfia'i  ovSev  ovras  aWo,  irXriv 
Ei8(oX'  oaroiirep  ^to)U.€v,  rj  Kov(f>r]v  cTKiav.' 

— Ajax,  125. 

Beside  which  most  worthily  stands  Shakespeare : — 

*  We  are  such  stuff 
As  dreams  are  made  on  ;  and  our  little  life 
Is  rounded  with  a  sleep.' 

. — 'Tempest,'  Act  iv.  sc.  i. 

Lastly,  Calderon  was  so  deeply  impressed  with  this  view  of 
life,  that  he  sought  to  embody  it  in  a  kind  of  metaphysical 
drama — '  Life  a  Dream.' " 

"  After  these  numerous  quotations  from  the  poets,  perhaps 
I  also  may  be  allowed  to  express  myself  in  a  metaphor.  Life 
and  dreams  are  leaves  of  the  same  hooJc.  The  systematic  read- 
ing of  this  book  is  real  life ;  but  when  the  reading  hours  (that 
is  the  day)  are  over,  we  often  continue  idly  to  turn  over  the 
leaves  and  read  a  page  here  and  there  without  method  or 
connection,  often  one  we  have  read  before,  sometimes  one  that 
is  new  to  us ;  but  always  in  the  same  book.  Such  an  isolated 
page  is  indeed  out  of  connection  with  the  systematic  study  of 

1  Cf.  chap.  ix.  «  Werke,  i.  20  ;  H.  and  K.,  i.  21. 


90  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  book,  but  it  does  not  seem  so  very  different  when  we 
remember  that  the  lohole  continuous  perusal  begins  ami  ends  just 
as  abruptly,  and  may  therefore  be  regarded  as  merely  a  larger 
single  page."  ^ 

We  must  not,  however,  allow  ourselves  to  be  deceived 
by  the  attractive  character  of  ordinary  idealism.  Whether 
"  phenoraenological  "  idealism,  with  its  opposition  between  the 
phenomenon  and  the  thing  in  itself,  is  true  or  not,  it  leads,  as 
has  been  said,  to  illusionism,  just  as  subjective  idealism  does. 
If  the  world  is  partly  phenomenon  and  partly  thing  in  itself, 
we  can  never  know  exactly  and  certainly  what  is  phenomenon 
and  what  is  thing  in  itself.  Then,  again,  idealism  is  not  x>'>'ovcd, 
as  Schopenhauer  thinks  it  is.  It  was  only  the  presence  in  his 
mind  of  certain  Kantian  ideas  about  knowledge  which  made 
him  think  the  teaching  of  idealism  to  be  fact.  And,  lastly, 
idealism  is  not  what  Schcpenhauer  thinks  it  is,  but  some- 
thing different. 

As  to  the  first  point,  in  whatever  form  we  encounter  the 
opposition  between  phenomenon  and  noumenon  in  Schopen- 
hauer, we  are  always  confronted  with  the  same  sense  of 
illusionism,  and  necessarily  so.  It  was  more  from  the  Kantian 
than  from  the  Cartesian  dualism  that  Schopenhauer  made  his 
real  start  in  philosophy.  He  was  governed  more  by  the  dis- 
tinction between  phenomenon  and  thing  in  itself  than  by  the 
distinction  between  the  self  and  the  world,  although  the  latter 
distinction,  as  we  have  seen,  is  undoubtedly  present  in  his 
system.  Most  students  of  Kant  are  perfectly  well  aware  of 
the  theoretical  impossibility  of  finding  any  bridge  between 
phenomenon  and  noumenon,  for  the  simple  reason  that  the 
no7imenon  is  not  a  fact  but  a  fiction,  intelligible  indeed 
as   a  fiction,  and  having  a  genesis  and  a  history  in  Kant's 

1  Welt  als  Wille,  i.  20,  21  ;  H.  and  K.,  i.  21,  22  (the  italics  are  mine).     It  will 
be  observed  that  Schopenhauer  rarely  accentuates  his  Greek. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  91 

own  thought,  or  even  in  human  thought,  but  still  a  fiction.^ 
It  must;  then,  be  conceded  that  Schopenhauer's  whole  phil- 
osophy, in  so  far  as  it  attempts  to  find  a  noumenon  or  a 
thing  in  itself  for  the  world,  is  an  imaginary  solution  of  an 
imaginary  difficulty.  Positively,  of  course,  it  is  very  much 
more—  -the  substitution  of  a  real  and  rational  way  of  relating 
the  self  to  the  world,  for  an  ideal  and  hypothetical  way. 
Schopenhpuer's  will  reveals  to  us  in  the  main  a  certain  side  of 
things  which  other  philosophers  have  overlooked  in  their  ac- 
count of  the  world.  He  says  that  we  do  not  know  the  "  thing 
in  itself"  of  the  world  hy  knowledge  at  all;  we  arrive  at  it 
by  another  path, — we  even  "  stumble  "  on  it  by  "  accident,"  or 
by  "  stealth,"  as  it  were  (through  the  "  back-door "  of  the 
willing  self!).  These  two  characteristics  of  will;  its  reality 
(as  opposed  to  the  ideality  of  such  principles  as  "  substance  " 
and  "  idea  "  and  "  monad  ")  and  its  easily  grasped  significance — 
the  fact  that  the  plain  man,  who  knows  nothing  about  science 
or  speculative  philosophy,  can  become  acquainted  with  the 
supreme  reality  of  all  things  through  the  simple  and  verifiable 
process  called  volition — made  Schopenhauer  feel  justified  in 
claiming  to  be  the  only  philosopher  who  had  brought  home  to 
the  human  mind  a  really  positive  and  verifiable  philosophy. 
By  willing  and  being,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  we  learn 
the  meaning  or  essence  of  the  world.  The  practical  value 
of  this  idea  lies  in  its  implicit  advocacy  of  the  need  of  our 
taking  up  a  direct  attitude  towards  the  world  if  we  are  to 
know  it  at  all  or  to  understand  it.  Strictly,  we  never  do 
know  the  world;  we  only  realise  it.^ 

'  See  a  paper  by  the  author  in  '  Mind '  (xvi.  373),  where  an  endeavour  is  made 
to  suggest  in  a  technical  way  what  exactly  the  thing  in  itself  may  be. 

^  It  is  not  hereby  implied  that  we  realise  the  whole  world  in  our  corporeal  or 
organic  sense  for  things,  because  in  that  case  an  objector  might  be  inclined  to 
assert  the  opposite  paradox — that  we  never  do  and  never  can  realise  the  world, 
but  that  we  can  only  know  it.  It  is  true  that  knowledge  represents  an  exact  as 
opposed  to  a  confused  sense  of  reality,  and  that  exactitude  (however  limited  in 
extent  our  exact  knowledge  may  be)  is  for  many  reasons  preferable  to  iuexacti- 


92  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Then  there  is  a  certain  illusionism  all  through  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy,  arising  from  the  very  fact  that  will  is,  as 
he  maintain?,  something  that  we  cannot  describe  in  terms  of 
knowledge.  He  glorifies,  as  it  were,  this  rniqueuess  of  his 
first  principle.  From  saying  that  we  cannot  know  it,  he 
tends  to  fall  into  the  danger  of  saying  that  it  is  something 
— not  merely  not  Jcnowahle,  but  something  as  different  from 
knowledge  as  can  well  be  imagined ;  something  not  merely 
not  logical,  but  something  a-logical,  irrational,  blind,  autono- 
mous, irresponsible,  free.  Naturally  there  is  something  illusory 
about  the  attempt  to  evolve  a  rational  world  from  something 
that  is  purely  irrational,  from  a  will  that  is  "  altogether  prior 
to  and  '  above  '  the  intellect."  Eeaders  of  Schopenhauer  know 
that  the  mind  simply  fails  to  attach  any  real  or  positive  con- 
tent to  his  blind  will,  which  is  supposed  to  be  the  central 
force  and  reality  of  the  world.  It  is  impossible  to  take  him 
seriously  when  he  says  that  the  will  somehow  "  strikes  a  light 
for  itself  in  the  brain  of  man  or  animals,"  or  to  allow  for  a 
moment  that   this  vague   anvil- spark    is   enough  to  account 

tude.  All  exact  knowledge  tends  to  banish  ignoble  fears  about  the  unknown  from 
the  mind  of  man.  Lucretius,  e.g.,  apprehended  this  idea,  and  gave  sublime  expres- 
sion to  it.  But  then,  the  very  idea  of  knowledge  is  that  it  is  simply  the  focusing 
of  our  attention  within  a  somewhat  nan'owly  defined  field  of  observation.  Even 
when  we  are  attending  to  one  or  two  objects,  there  is  an  outlying  universe  of 
wliich  we  have  only  a  general  or  confused  apprehension.  We  must  never  over- 
look this  sense  that  we  have  of  a  greater  sphere  of  reality  than  may  be  before  us 
at  one  time.  It  is  through  thinking  of  the  larger  world  and  of  the  "  larger  sense  " 
which  we  may  have  for  reality  that  we  keep  in  view  the  possibility  of  our  having 
new  sensations  and  new  experiences.  And  again,  even  if  we  look  within  the 
sphere  of  exact  observation  or  attention,  we  shall  find  that  our  knowledge  is  not 
so  definite  and  absolute  as  it  may  appear  to  be.  Within  that  sphere,  too,  we 
know  only  the  relations  that  objects  sustain  to  our  experience  and  volition.  The 
puzzles  of  philosophers  (Zeno,  Euclid  of  Megara,  Pyrrho,  Kant,  &c.)  about  the 
smallest  mathematical  and  physical  units,  about  atoms  and  miniTna  divisibilia  and 
the  like,  show  this.  The  very  agnosticism  which  is  the  obverse  of  the  confidence 
inspired  by  exact  knowledge,  bears  its  testimony  to  the  fact  that  our  ultimate 
attitude  of  mind  toward  the  universe  ought  to  be  one  of  openness,  receptivity, 
and  trust,  and  not  one  of  closed  and  definite  conviction  that  we  know  all  we  can 
ever  know. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  93 

for  the  intellect  and  the  consciousness  that  are  in  the  world. 
It  is  cbsurd  to  try  to  describe  the  world  in  terms  of  a 
principle  which  is  essentially  unknowable. 

And,  thirdly,  there  are  in  Schopenhauer  all  the  fallacies  in- 
cident to  the  very  notion  of  the  thing  in  itself.  A  "thing 
in  itself,"  after  all,  can  never  connect  itself  naturally  and  logi- 
cally with  other  things.  How  can  the  root  of  the  world  be 
known  if  the  very  essence  of  this  root  is  to  conceal  itself  ? 
Thus  once  again,  if  idealism  means  that  the  world  is  pheno- 
menon or  appearance,  it  inevitably  ends  in  contradiction ;  for 
if  the  world  is  said  to  be  a  phenomenon  of  the  brain  as 
the  brain  in  turn  is  of  something  else,  this  means  that  we 
have  two  or  three  things  to  reckon  with  in  our  thought,  the 
phenomenon,  and  the  brain,  and  the  third  thing  in  question, 
the  Xy  and  so  it  would  be  untrue  to  say  that  we  know  only 
phenomena.  The  illusionism  incident  to  this  whole  vein 
of  thought  is  expressed  in  such  a  sentence  as  the  follow- 
ing :  "  It  is  Maya,  the  veil  of  deceit,  which  obscures  the  eyes 
of  mortals,  and  lets  them  see  a  world  about  which  they  can 
neither  say  that  it  exists  nor  that  it  does  not  exist ;  for  it  is 
like  a  dream,  like  the  glittering  of  the  sun  on  the  sand  which 
the  traveller  takes  from  afar  to  be  water,  or  like  the  piece  of 
rope  that  he  throws  on  the  ground  and  takes  to  be  a  snake."  ^ 
If  the  world  with  which  we  are  in  contact  is  only  phenomenon, 
everything  becomes  a  dream.  If  the  world  is  only  phenomenon, 
how  can  we  ever  inquire  of  ourselves  whether  it  may  not  after 
all  be  something  more  than  this  ?  Generally  speaking,  or- 
dinary dogmatic  idealism  affects  us  pretty  much  as  Berkeley's 
idealism  affected  David  Hume — "  it  produces  no  conviction." 
If  there  is  indeed  a  thing  in  itself,  a  thing  whose  essence  is 
that  it  cannot  be  presented  or  known,  then  we  can  never 
lay  hold  of  it  by  any  method  short  of  cutting  our  own  heads 
off  (losing  or  getting  rid  of  our  intellect  altogether),  seeing 

'  Schop. ,  Werke,  ii.  9. 


94  schofenhauer's  system. 

that  it  is  the  intellect  which  always  stands  in  the  way  of  our 
really  coming  face  to  face  with  things.  And  to  this  position 
Schopenhauer  actually  comes  in  all  that  he  says  to  the  effect 
that  we  ought  deliberately  to  give  up  the  attempt  to  know  the 
thing  in  itself.  He  comes  to  it  also,  we  shall  see,  in  his  dis- 
paragement of  the  intellect  in  art  and  religion. 

We  cannot  in  our  perplexity  fall  back  on  agnosticism, 
because  agnosticism  is  not  a  satisfactory  philosophy ;  the 
experience  of  life  shows  us  this.  Agnosticism  may  lead  to 
mere  empty  Pyrrhonism,  which  is  too  thin  and  useless  to 
be  taken  seriously ;  or  it  may  lead  to  mysticism,  which  is  not 
philosophy.  Agnosticism  generally  does  lead,  in  the  case  of 
those  who  profess  it,  to  an  airy  empiricism  in  theory  and 
practice,  which  substitutes  brilliant  or  incisive  utterances  for 
reasoned  beliefs  and  impressions  and  sensations  for  ideas  and 
thoughts.  The  only  possible  attitude  of  the  mind  to  the 
world,  if  we  are  bent  on  learning  the  meaning  of  things,  is  a 
direct  one,  and  not  a  general  paralysis  before  such  self-created 
barriers  as  the  imaginary  and  spurious  distinction  between 
phenomenon  and  noumenon.  One  has  only  to  try  to  read 
Schelling's  attempts  to  evolve  a  real  world  from  the  thing  in 
itself  to  refuse  to  attach  any  meaning  to  the  attempts  of 
Schopenhauer  to  give  a  real  description  of  the  world  in  terms 
of  the  distinction  between  phenomena  and  the  thing  in  itself. 
Hegel  has  taught  us  that  these  words  have  only  a  logical,  or, 
as  we  should  now  say,  an  epistemological  significance,  and 
not  an  ontological  one.  Whatever  Schopenhauer  has  to  teach 
us,  it  is  not  along  the  line  of  his  account  of  the  world  in 
terms  of  this  distinction  between  phenomenon  and  noumenon. 
But  of  this  enough.  If  idealism  leads  to  illusionism  at  any 
one  point,  it  is  sufficient  reason  for  giving  it  up  as  a  com- 
plete philosophy  of  reality.  Hegel,  in  his  dialectic  march, 
simply  evaded  the  distinction  between  phenomenon  and 
noumenon,  regarding  it  as  a  pitfall.     We  may  do  the  same. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  95 

A  full  examination  of  Schopenhauer's  contention  that  both 
the  matter  and  the  form  of  thought  are  of  subjective  origin 
would  involve  the  whole  of  modern  philosophy.  Eesults  alone 
can  be  stated  here,  and  these  very  summarily.  In  the  first 
place,  the  forms  of  thought  which,  after  Kant,  were  long  sup- 
posed to  be  demonstrably  subjective,  are  not  really  so.  The 
various  categories,  such  as  "  cause,"  "  substance,"  "  plurality," 
"  number,"  "  time,"  and  "  space,"  are  both  subjective  and  objec- 
tive ;  they  represent  certain  ways  in  which  the  self  regards  the 
world  of  its  experience,  or  ways  in  which  the  world  that  we 
know  and  of  which  we  form  a  part  is  actually  constituted. 
Things  are  really  causally  connected  with  one  another,  and 
things  actually  are  a  plurality ;  and  there  is  such  a  succession 
as  "  time  "  and  such  a  mode  of  arrangement  of  things  as  spatial 
juxtaposition,  and  so  on.  Cause,  substance,  number,  time,  etc., 
are  not  mere  conceptions  which  we  invent  for  theoretical 
reasons  in  interpreting  things.  They  all  represent  something 
that  we  can  and  do  actually  perceive,  something  therefore  that 
is  real.  Things  that  we  know  are  actually  determined  by,  and 
causally  act  upon,  each  other,  actually  are  in  space  and  time, 
etc.  If  I  am  asked,  "  Is  space  a  real  thing  ?  "  I  reply  :  Most 
certainly  it  is  not ;  there  is  no  such  thing  as  space :  there  is 
only  spatial  quality,  and  even  that  is  not  a  thing  in  itself,  an 
aspect  of  things  that  we  can  separate  from  all  the  other  aspects 
of  things  like  colour  and  physical  resistance,  etc.  Space  is 
real  enough,  as  the  spatial  quality  of  things  ;  the  world  is 
not  in  space  (as  if  space  were  greater  than  the  world),  but 
there  is  only  one  world,  and  it  has  spatial  properties,  which 
may  be  mathematically  determined.  It  has  also  causal  as- 
pects, that  is,  physical  energy ;  and  it  has  also  moral  aspects, 
consisting  in  the  relations  that  persons  sustain  to  each  other; 
and  it  has  also  jesthetical  aspects,  consisting  in  the  various 
forms  of  natural  and  artistic  beauty,  and  so  on.  The  whole 
difificulty  about  the  nature  of  the  categories  or  the  forms  of 


96  SCHOrENHAUER's  SYSTEM. 

thought  has  arisen  through  thinking  of  the  objective  world 
and  the  subjective  world  as  two  separate  things,  which  have 
got  to  be  connected  with  each  other.  Now,  as  has  been  said, 
what  "  God  has  joined "  let  not  man  "  put  asunder."  The 
subjective  and  the  objective  are  really  connected  with  each 
other,  and  interpenetrate  each  other  in  the  world  that  we 
know  ;  the  world  has — if  we  will  put  it  so — both  objective 
aspects  and  subjective  aspects.  A  phenomenon  like  colour, 
for  instance,  is  botli  objective  and  subjective,  and  this  must 
be  definitely  recogniserl  once  and  for  all.  The  categories  or 
the  forms  of  thought  are  real  aspects  of  things,  real  in  the 
world  that  we  know.  And  as  we  do  not  know  any  other 
world  than  the  one  in  which  we  exist,  the  world  is  never  for 
philosophical  purposes  to  be  thought  of  apart  from  the  self  or 
the  subject  or  consciousness.  If  a  person  does  not  understand 
and  accept  this,  the  sooner  he  "  learns  Kint "  the  better. 

It  is  needless  to  point  out  here  ths-t  the  question  about 
the  source  of  the  categories,  and  about  the  way  in  which 
we  come  to  know  them,  is  qrate  differtsnt  from  the  question 
of  the  real  nature  of  the  categories,  or  oi  the  "  forms  of  know- 
ledge "  as  such.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  Schopenhauer  himself,  in 
his  polemic  against  abstract  conceptions,  has  helped  to  bring 
out  the  fact  that  the  categories  are  percepts  as  well  as  con- 
cepts. To  every  perception — to  the  causal  perception,  for 
example,  or  to  the  perception  of  sequence — some  real  thing 
corresponds ;  or,  rather,  every  perception  represents  a  real 
aspect  of  things.  The  "  real "  contains  both  subjective  and 
objective  factors,  and  the  Critical  Philosophy  has  helped  to 
bring  this  out.  If  any  one  asks  what  a  fact  like  "  colour " 
or  "  cause "  is  apart  from  the  "  subject "'  or  the  "  self "  or 
"  consciousness,"  of  course  there  is  absolutely  nothing  to 
answer.  The  fact  of  colour,  or  the  fact  of  cause,  represents 
a  synthesis  of  subjective  and  objective  elements.  The  world 
we  know  is  a  world  in  which  we  may  feel  at  home  because  it 


SCHOPENHAUER    AND   IDEALISM.  97 

is  both  spiritual  and  material  at  the  same  time.  The  matter 
that  we  know  is  matter  which  is  bound  up  with  the  percep- 
tions and  the  life  of  living  beings.  Both  the  primary  and  the 
secondary  qualities  of  matter  are  qualities  which  are  perceived 
by  psychical  beings.  And  then  again,  when  we  put  what 
appears  to  be  unorganised  matter  under  the  microscope,  we 
frequently  find  it  to  consist  of  decayed  organic  or  cellulated 
matter.  Neither  in  psychology  nor  in  histology  is  it  pos- 
sible or  desiral/le  to  make  an  absolute  separation  between 
the  physical  and  the  psychical  or  between  dead  and  living 
matter.  Unorganised  and  organised  matter,  the  objective 
and  the  subjective,  are  all  indissolubly  blended  with  each 
other  through  the  whole  range  of  reality.  Anything  that 
we  really  perceive,  or  experience,  or  are  compelled  to  think 
about  the  world,  is  true  of  the  world,  is  matter  of  fact 
— part  of  the  world.  Idealism  did  not  prove,  and  never 
could  pi'ove,  that  the  principles  of  reality,  the  forms  under 
which  we  are  compelled  to,  and  actually  do,  view  reality,  are 
only  in  the  mind.  The  forms  of  reality  are  as  objective  and 
really  existent  as  anything  else.  At  least  there  is  no  existent 
unformed  matter.  "  Only  in  the  mind,"  too,  is  a  nonsensical 
or  contradictory  expression.  There  is  no  mind  apart  from  our 
experience  of  reality,  and  our  ea^erience  ct  reality  is  in  a  sense 
just  what  we  mean  by  reality ;  it  is  at  least  the  highest  aspect 
of  reality — the  point  at  which  reality  sums  itself  up  and  gives 
its  highest  expression  of  itself. 

Schopenhauer's  real  reason  for  identifying  himself  at  the 
outset  with  idealism  was  probably  an  epistemological  one.  It 
is  to  be  found  in  certain  ideas  that  he  had  about  knowledge. 
He  thought  we  could  never  get  at  reality  because  "  between 
us  and  reality  "  there  "  always  comes  the  brain  "  (or  mind), 
which  ex  hypothesi  always  "idealises"  things,  reveals  only  their 
"  effects  on  us  "  and  not  what  they  are  "  in  themselves."  Now 
it  is  all  very  well,  again,  to  grasp  the  truth  that  nothing 

G 


98  Schopenhauer's  system. 

can  be  called  a  fact  until  it  has  been  constituted  as  a 
"  fact "  for  the  experience  of  some  conscious  subject  or  other. 
"  Reality,"  indeed,  means  what  appeals  to  us  or  to  some  other 
conscious  beings  as  real.  But  this  is  no  reason  for  refusing 
to  admit  that  we  know  "  things."  We  do  know  them.  They 
are  what  they  appear  to  be  to  our  consciousness.  It  is  absurd 
to  talk  about  things  as  they  were  "  before  they  entered  into  " 
our  consciousness,  or  "  apart  from  "  our  consciousness,  for  the 
simple  reason  that  there  are  no  things  "  out  of  relation  to  con- 
sciousness," or  more  simply  still,  because  this  very  expression 
means  absolutely  nothing.  Idealism  ought  not  to  express 
itself  by  saying  that  things  are  only  "in  the  mind,"  but 
rather  by  saying  that  the  world  is  throughout  a  reality  for 
consciousness  —  is  in  fact,  whatever  else  it  is,  a  spiritual 
world,  a  world  in  which  psychical  beings  really  exist  as 
fundamental  or  ultimate  constituent  elements.  To  be  sure, 
all  is  not  made  plain  by  this  mere  statement.^  It  is  not,  for 
instance,  meant  that  wo  are  conscious  of  the  whole  of  reality, 
but  only  that  what  we  do  experience  is  reality ;  and  that  the 
real  we  do  not  yet  know,  will  not  and  cannot  be  inconsistent 
with  the  reality  that  we  do  know.  Schopenhauer  was  wrong 
in  thinking  that  Kant's  metaphysic  necessarily  led  men  back 
to  that  pseudo-philosophy  that  is  called  subjective  or  ordinary 
idealism.  To  say  that  "we  cannot  know  things  because  between 
us  and  things  there  always  comes  the  mind,"  represents  a  con- 
fusion between  metaphysic  and  crude  or  dogmatic  idealism. 
It  is  all  very  well  to  point  out  the  subjective  factor  in  things, 
but  this  does  not  mean  that  the  whole  of  reality  may  be  called 
subjective. 

It  is  the  dynamic  character  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy 
which  helps  us  out  of  the  difficulty  of  ordinary  as  well  as  of 
subjective  idealism.     Instead  of  saying  that  our  consciousness 

^  Cf.  infra,  chaps,  v.  and  vi. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  99 

reveals  to  us  only  certain  representations  or  perceptions  or  im- 
pressions of  things,  we  ought  to  say  tliat  consciousness  makes 
us  aware  of  the  relation  which  things  sustain  to  our  action. 
It  will  be  found  upon  examination  that  all  the  perceptions  of 
reality  which  animals  and  human  beings  have  are  simply  the 
experiences  which  determine  their  action  towards  their  en- 
vironment.^ Each  being  knows  enough  of  reality  to  determine 
its  own  action  in  regard  to  reality,  its  own  function  in  the 
system  of  things.  And  it  will  be  found  that  the  conceptions 
which  man  has  about  things  may,  as  Schopenhauer  suggested, 
be  reduced  to  perceptions.'^  and  consequently  to  the  knowledge 
of  things  that  is  necessary  and  sufficient  to  him  for  the  pur- 
poses of  his  life.  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  causes  us  to 
relate  the  "  representations  "  and  the  "  impressions  "  and  the 
"  perceptions  "  of  the  idealists  to  the  action  of  our  will.  He 
shows  how  all  our  knowledge  simply  helps  us  to  determine 
cur  action,  and  so  he  gives  knowledge  its  real  place  in  the 
system  of  things.  It  may  doubtless  be  urged  that  it  is  just 
as  much  a  piece  of  idealism  to  say  that  all  reality  is  related 
to  our  will,  as  to  say  that  all  reality  is  related  to  our  intellect. 
Indeed  it  not  only  may  be  so ;  it  is  so.  But  then  we  have 
already  suggested  that  the  relations  that  tilings  sustain  to  us 
constitute  the  ideality  of  the  world.  We  must  not  fight  shy  of 
admitting  reality  to  be  what  it  professes  to  be,  and  actually 
is.  It  would  not  be  hard  to  show  that  even  Berkeley  identi- 
fied reality  with  our  practical  experience.  But  Schopenhauer 
was  the  first  to  base  a  whole  system  of  philosophy  on  this  idea. 
The  reality  that  we  know  in  sense  perception  is  only  so 
much  of  reality  as  affects  our  practical  activity ;  as  psychology 
teaches  us,  it  represents  that  which  furthers  or  opposes  our 
activity.  Every  being  knows  about  the  world  just  what  is  in 
dynamic  relation  to  his  v^ill  and  activity.  A  complete  know- 
ledge of  the  world  could  be  obtained  by  summating  or  adding 

^  Cf.  chap.  iv.  '^  Cf.  chap.  iii. 


100  Schopenhauer's  system. 

together  all  the  practical  experiences  of  the  various  different 
living  beings  that  inhabit  the  earth.  Voltaire's  fable  of  Micro- 
megas  suggests  this.  Before  Schopenhauer  it  was  the  fashion 
to  think  that  all  reality  was  related  simply  to  our  ideas 
about  things,  but  he  has  caused  us  to  see  in  all  the  breadth 
of  its  significance  the  fact  that  reality  is  that  which  is  related 
to  the  will,  to  the  evolution  of  man's  life.  He  has  given  us, 
in  spite  of  his  pessimism,  a  hopeful  view  of  reality ;  because 
he  must  be  held  to  have  taught  tliat  the  evolution  of  man's 
life  (since  it  is  the  evolution  of  the  highest  thing  that  we  know 
in  the  world)  is  not  merely  %e  highest  manifestation  of  an 
unknown  reality,  but  tho^  actual  reality  of  things  itself.  Scien- 
tific knowledge  simply  ijnfolds  to  us  in  a  more  exact  way  than 
ordinary  perception  does  the  relation  that  things  sustain  to  the 
movements  of  our  bodies.  All  scientific  knowledge  serves  to 
increase  man's  power  over  nature,  in  so  far  as  it  tells  him 
more  and  more  clearly  what  the  conditions  of  human  effort 
are.  The  knowledge  that  our  brain  gives  of  reality,  so  far 
from  standing  in  the  way  of  our  effectively  knowing  things,  dis- 
closes to  us  the  actual  reality  of  things,  for  in  the  last  resort  it 
simply  tells  us  the  relations  that  things  sustain  to  our  activ- 
ity. Schopenhauer's  acceptance,  then,  of  the  idealistic  hypo- 
thesis must  somehow  be  translated  into  the  more  real  kind  of 
idealism,  which  he  himself  has  given  us,  the  dynamic  idealism, 
which  is  true  of  things,  the  idealism  which  teaches  that  the 
dynamic  relations  of  things  constitute  their  reality.  In  inter- 
preting the  dynamic  relations  that  things  sustain  to  each  other, 
we  must  select  a  point  of  reference  to  which  all  the  movement 
in  the  world  may  be  referred.  The  point  of  reference  which 
we  may  best  select,  and  indeed  the  only  one  which  we  can 
select,  is  the  movements  of  our  bodies,  or,  in  other  words,  the 
practical  purposes  of  our  lives. 

III.  In  so  far  as  we  seem  in  all  this  to  be  merely  attaining 


SCHOPENHAUER    AND    IDEALISM.  101 

to  a  more  real  kind  of  idealism  about  ordinary  reality,  there 
must,  after  all,  be  considerable  reason  for  thinking  that  the 
true  idealism  has  a  pretty  serious  hold  upon  reality.  The 
true  ideahsra  may  be  what  Schopenhauer  called  the  transcen- 
dental, and  not  the  ordinary  crude  subjective  idealism.  And 
indeed,  as  he  says,  there  is  much  misunderstanding  about 
idealism.  "  In  spite  of  all  that  one  may  say,  nothing  is  so 
persistently  and  ever  anew  misunderstood  as  idealism,  because 
it  is  interpreted  to  mean  that  one  denies  the  empirical  reality 
of  the  external  world.  Upon  this  rests  the  perpetual  return 
to  the  appeal  to  common-sense,  which  appears  in  many  forms 
and  guises ;  for  example,  as  an  '  irresistible  conviction '  in 
the  Scottish  school,  or  as  Jacobi's  faith  in  the  reality  of 
the  external  world."  ^  We  may  interpret  these  words  of 
Schopenhauer  to  imply  that  he  did  not  accept  idealism  in 
the  crude  and  absurd  sense,  without,  however,  giving  up  our 
contention  that  many  of  tiie  difficulties  of  his  philosophy  arose 
out  of  the  fact  that  the  .arms  in  which  he  allowed  himself 
to  speak  and  think  of  idealism  were  often  inaccurate  and 
unreal.  He  ought  to  have  given  up  the  use  of  all  such 
expressions  as  "  the  self  with  a  single  state,"  or  the  "  forms 
of  knowledge  lying  in  the  mind,"  etc.  If  idealism  only 
means  that  reality  is  vitally  related  to  human  purposes  and 
human  life,  all  serious  people  are  idealists.  "  In  vain  can 
rock,  tree,  brook,  the  blue  heaven,  sun,  moon,  and  stars,  be 
said  to  exisf,  with  absolutely  no  eye  to  perceive  it  all."  As 
Du  Bois-Eeymoud^  reminds  us,  the  Mosaic  "There  was 
light "  is  simply  false,  if  we  do  not  think  of  light  as  partly 
formed  by  the  meeting  of  the  objective  and  the  subjective  in 
some  sensitive  eye-spot — even  of  an  "  infusorium  distinguish- 
ing for  the  first  time  clearness  from  darkness."  All  that  can 
be  seriously  objected  against  the  idealist's  hypothesis  is  that : 

1  World  as  Will,  &c. ;  H.  and  K.,  ii.  169. 

'^  Die  Grenzen  des  Naturerkennens,  s.  17.     Leipzig,  lb84. 


102  SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 

"  The  external  world  hy  no  means  presents  itself ,  as  Jacdbi 
declares,  upon  credit,  and  is  accepted  by  us  on  trust  or  faith. 
It  presents  itself  as  that  wliicli  it  is,  and  it  performs  directly 
%vhat  it  loromises."  ^ 

The  sentence  last  quoted  is  extremely  important,  and  con- 
tains a  profound  insight  into  reality.  Even  Hegel  might 
have  written  it.  It  reminds  one  indeed  of  the  saying  of 
Hegel  that  he  who  would  know  the  mind  must  learn  not  to 
"  fight  shy  of  its  special  phenomena."  It  suggests  that  the 
true  attitude  we  ought  to  take  to  reality  is  a  direct  one,  an 
attitude  of  credence  and  not  of  distrust.  Schopenhauer  himself 
did  not  always  remember  this,  although  his  philosophy  of  will 
by  its  very  existence  bears  testimony  to  it.  All  is  real  that 
we  experience  to  be  real :  "  colour,"  "  pleasure,"  "  beauty," — 
all  these  things  represent  some  kind  of  reality,  and  we  must 
take  reality  to  be  what  it  professes  to  be  ;  colour  and  beauty  are 
no  less  real  because  they  are  not  like  granite  or  gravitation, 
nor  is  an  "  idea  "  any  the  less  a  fact  or  reality  because  it  is 
only  a  "  mental "  reality.  There  may  be,  in  short,  various 
"  grades  of  reality "  as  Schopenhauer  phrases  it,  and  to  the 
consideration  of  these  we  shall  immediately  proceed.  The 
distinction  between  the  phenomenon  and  the  thing  in  itself 
has  only  a  relative  and  not  an  ultimate  significance.  The 
world  cannot  be  split  up  into  sections  which  are  not  con- 
nected with  each  other  and  with  the  whole.  The  strange  thing 
in  Schopenhauer  is  that  he  knew  this,  as  the  quotation  given 
above  shows,  and  yet  that  he  allowed  himself  to  talk  of  a 
merely  relative  distinction  in  things  as  if  it  were  a  physical 
and  real  distinction.  He  talks  of  our  "  mind  "  or  our  "  skull  " 
or  our  "  skin  "  being  a  "  wall "  between  us  and  things.  Out 
of  this  crude  sort  of  idealism  nothing  can  ever  come  but 
illusionism.  Our  "  mind  "  and  our  "  skull "  and  our  "  skin  " 
and  "  things  "  are  all  parts  of  reality.  No  one  of  them  is 
1  Die  Welt,  &c.,  Ergiinz.,  Werke,  iii.  9  ;  H.  and  K.,  ii.  169. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  103 

more  real  than  the  other.  If  it  can  be  shown  that  our  mind 
or  our  will  actually  sustains  a  more  important  relation  to 
the  rest  of  the  world — than  stones  and  plants  and  animals — 
then,  of  course,  our  will  may  be  claimed  to  represent  the 
highest  aspect  of  reality,  but  not  until  this  has  been  proved. 

Schopenhauer's  idea  of  will,  as  has  been  said  once  or  twice, 
doubtless  came  to  him  partly  by  way  of  a  hasty  induction. 
Everything  seemed  to  be  in  motion  or  in  activity,  and  even 
the  self  seemed  to  consist  of  impulse  and  purpose.  But  a 
system  can  hardly  be  based  upon  mere  observation  unless  that 
observation  also  contains  some  measure  of  scientific  truth  about 
things.  If  our  "  experience  "  of  reality  can  really  be  reduced 
to  mean  simply  the  extent  to  which  reality  "  affects  our  will " 
(our  development),  then  will  or  purpose  may  indeed  be  said  to 
be  the  supreme  and  the  characteristic  fact  of  the  world.  No 
one  thing,  of  course,  can  exactly  be  said  to  be  real  on  its 
own  account.  All  things  sustain  dynamic  relations  to  all 
other  things.  If  this  is  what  transcendental  idealism  means, 
there  does  not  seem  to  be  much  serious  objection  to  pro- 
fessing a  general  adherence  to  its  principles.  All  things 
have  a  borrowed  or  an  ideal  kind  of  reality,  in  so  far  as 
their  reality  is  not  to  be  found  altogether  in  themselves  but 
in  the  relations  that  they  sustain  to  other  things  and  to 
conscious  persons.  This,  we  know,  has  become  poetical  as 
well  as  philosophical  commonplace — 

"  Flower  in  the  crannied  wall,"  etc. 

It  is  an  outcome  of  Schopenhauer's  positive  teaching.  But 
Schopenhauer  teaches  more  than  this  in  suggesting  to  us  the 
reality  to  which  all  other  reality  may  be  considered  relative, 
the  will  or  the  purpose  of  man.  We  shall  see  his  meaning 
better  to  some  extent  in  the  chapter  on  the  Bondage  of 
]\fan. 

Schopenhauer's  idealism,  then  (the  relativity  of  all  things  to 


104  schopexhauer's  system. 

the  will),  comes  to  be  the  obverse  of  the  idealism  common  to 
most  followers  of  Kant,  that  all  things  are  relative  to  our  in- 
tellect. Even  if  no  more  than  a  complement  to  intellectual 
idealism  it  is  still  something  of  a  discovery.  But  more 
than  this,  it  has  a  reality  which  the  other  idealism  had 
not.  The  human  mind  naturally  grew  tired  and  always  does 
grow  tired  of  a  philosophy  which  says  that  the  reaP  consists 
simply  of  intellectual  relations,  unified  and  correlated  indeed 
by  a  mind,  but  still  simply  intellectual  relations.  It  was 
always  felt  that  "  Gods  and  men  are  in  very  truth  more  than 
logical  categories,"  yet  this  intuitive  perception — it  is  a  pro- 
found mistake  for  philosophy  to  neglect  such  perceptions,  and 
Schopenhauer  never  neglects  thera~was  rated  simply  as  a 
common-sense  remark  which  had  nothing  to  do  with  philoso- 
phical truth.  And  so  men  went  on  holding  one  thing  by  way 
of  intellectual  conviction  (that  the  real  is  largely  ideal  or 
mental)  and  another  by  way  of  practical  persuasion  (that  the 
real  furnished  a  positive  limit  to  human  activity).  Now  reality 
on  Schopenhauer's  principles — his  subjective  and  ordinary 
idealism  being  both  set  aside  as  full  of  confusion  and  illusion 
— means,  in  the  first  instance, /imc^iou.  Things  are  real  which 
organically  affect  each  other,  and  which  discharge  some  func- 
tion or  other  in  the  universe.  Things  are  real  in  so  far  as 
they  operate  upon  each  other.  The  human  personality  con- 
sequently is  real  in  so  far  as  it  operates  upon  the  rest  of 
reality,  and  leaves  its  "  footprints  on  the  sands  of  time."  If 
human  beings,  as  it  were,  can  carve  their  purposes  into  the 
centre  of  things  they  attain  to  reality.  The  intellect,  ac- 
cording to  Schopenhauer,  shows  us  the  relations  that  things 
sustain  to  our  will.     The  intellect  in  the  Kantian  philosophers 

^  Cf.  "We  are  thus  apparently  left  face  to  face  with  a  mind  (thinking  subject) 
which  is  the  source  of  relations  (categories),  and  a  woi'ld  which  is  constituted  by 
relations  ;  with  a  mind  which  is  conscious  of  itself,  and  a  world  of  which  that 
mind  may  without  metaphor  be  described  as  the  creator." — "A  Criticism  of  Cur- 
rent Idealistic  Theories,"  by  Arthur  James  Balfour.     'Mind,'  Oct.  1893. 


SCHOPENHAUER  AND   IDEALISM.  105 

was  only  a  plexus  of  forms — a  kaleidoscopical  entity ;  the  in- 
tellect in  Schopenhauer  is  a  servant  of  the  organism  guiding 
the  will  in  the  pursuit  of  its  ends.  The  intellect  is  real  as  the 
servant  of  the  will,  and  real  only  as  such.  Like  other  things, 
it  becomes  transcendeutally  "  ideal "  if  it  is  regarded  as  being 
anything  ultimate  on  its  own  account.  It  can  always  be 
shown  that  it  only  has  an  existence  in  relation  to  the  will 
and  the  feelings  and  the  body.  It  was  not  very  strange  that 
philosophers  who  had  allowed  themselves  to  overlook  this 
got  into  so  much  difficulty.  They  devoted  too  much  attention 
to  the  intellectual  side  of  things.  A  reading  of  the  world 
which  has  no  bearing  on  human  action  should  be  discarded 
as  unreal  and  partial. 

But  to  return  to  the  human  organism,  which  is  apparently 
the  most  real  thing  amid  the  world  of  things,  the  thing  to 
which  all  other  things  seem  relative.  The  purposes  that  can 
be  read  in  the  will  of  man  are  the  highest  purposes  that  seem 
to  exist  in  things.  So  we  may  say  that  all  other  things  are 
"  ideal "  in  respect  of  the  human  personality — that  is,  that 
their  reality  falls  short  of  it  and  only  exists  in  relation  to  it. 
Of  course  Schopenhauer  himself  is  a  pantheist  who  regards  all 
organisms  and  personalities  as  only  functions  of  the  one  cosmic 
will.  Individuality  is  to  him  an  illusion.  It  is  illusory  as 
something  that  is  vouched  for,  he  thinks,  only  by  the  intellect. 
The  intellect  is  that  which  breaks  up  things  into  individu- 
alities and  separate  existences.  To  this  we  have  already 
objected.  If  human  beings  appear  to  he  individual  beings, 
there  is  every  reason  for  holding  that  they  are  so.  But  the 
best  guarantee  for  the  attainment  of  real  individuality  by  the 
human  person  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  the  will  of  the 
individual  seems  ever  to  be  trying  to  attain  to  a  greater  or 
higher  kind  of  reality  than  it  at  any  one  moment  or  at  any 
one  stage  of  its  experience  possesses.  If  the  will  is  the  reality 
of  things,  then  it  is  to  be  expected  that  the  human  personality 


106  Schopenhauer's  system. 

must  attain  to  the  kinu  cf  reality  which  it  seems  to  be  seek- 
ing. And  so,  as  far  as  the  reality  of  the  individual  goes, 
Schopenhauer's  teaching  is  more  satisfactory  than  that  of  Hegel. 
In  his  intellectual  philosophy  he  virtually  denies  the  reality 
of  human  individuality,  just  as  Hegel  is  bound  to  do.  But 
elsewhere  he  has  made  us  ask  this  more  serious  question  about 
the  reality  of  man :  may  not  the  reality  at  which  man's  will 
seems  to  be  aiming  be  taken  to  be  the  true  reality  of  the 
human  person  ?  ^  Is  the  existence  of  the  individual  something 
fully  complete  once  for  all,  or  is  it  a  process  of  gradual  realisa- 
tion ?  Is  it  something  that  he  now  has  or  that  he  is  trying  to 
attain  to  ?  Kant  thought  that  the  moral  individual  was  an 
end  in  himself,  and  that  the  universe  was  a  moral  kingdom 
in  which  every  one  person  regarded  every  other  person  as  a 
person  and  not  as  a  mere  thing.  It  is  easy  for  intellectual 
philosophy  to  regard  all  the  different  consciousnesses  in  the 
world  as  phases  of  one  consciousness,  and  so  as  at  once  real 
and  transient.  But  ethics  teaches  us  that  the  individual  is  not 
so  much  real  as  destined  to  he  real.^  We  shall  see  the  value  of 
Schopenhauer's  contention  that  morality  has  to  do  with  the 
will.  Man  has  not  yet  attained  in  the  exercise  of  his  will  to 
the  kind  of  reality  of  which  he  seems  to  be  capable.  Eeality, 
in  short,  for  man  seems  to  lie  ever  before  and  onwards  in  new 
actions  and  in  new  volitions.  Man  never  is,  but  is  always 
trying  to  be.  There  is  a  certain  amount  of  idealism  which 
seems  inevitable  even  about  the  human  personality.  Men 
who  do  not  in  their  lives  attain  to  the  deeper  purposes  of 
manhood  can  hardly  be  said  to  be  real,  "  He  to  whom  all  men 
and  all  things  have  not  at  times  appeared  as  mere  phantoms  or 
illusions  has  no  capacity  for  philosophy,"  says  Schopenhauer. 
And  of  course  no  individual,  for  that  part  of  it,  exists  alto- 

^  The  chapters  upon  art  and  ethics  and  religion  will  treat  of  this  question  in 
more  detail. 
*  Cf.  chap.  vii.  • 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND    IDEALISM.  107 

getlier  for  himself.     His  reality  consists  to  some  extent  in  the 
relations  which  he  sustains  to  other  people. 

It  is  thus  indeed  perfectly  natural  to  take  an  idealistic 
view  of  the  personality  of  man.  But  if  the  reality  of  man  is 
placed  beyond  his  merely  actual  or  present  existence,  wherein 
can  it  be  said  to  consist  ?  Shall  we  say  in  his  purpose  and 
in  his  will  ?  If  so,  we  shall  come  very  close  to  the  only  ulti- 
mate meaning  that  can  be  read  out  of  Schopenhauer.  We 
must,  as  it  were,  find  some  reality  on  which  the  reality  of 
all  other  things  can  be  shown  to  depend.  And  so  Schopen- 
hauer is  in  a  sense  right  in  saying  that  the  philosopher  must 
always  seek  for  a  thing  in  itself.  Only  by  a  thing  in  itself 
we  must  not  mean  a  thing  which  really  exists  by  itself  apart 
from  all  other  things,  but  a  thing  on  which  the  reality  of 
everything  else  seems  in  some  way  to  hang.  "  All  philosophy, 
to  be  honest,"  says  Schopenhauer,  "  must  be  idealistic."  This 
can  refer  only  to  the  dependent  reality  of  the  greater  number 
of  things.  We  must  not,  however,  decide  too  hastily  what,  on 
Schopenhauer's  principles,  ought  to  be  regarded  as  the  ulti- 
mately real  thing  in  the  human  person.  We  must  first 
study  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art  and  his  philosophy  of 
religion.  We  shall  see  how  in  his  philosophy  of  art  he  tends 
to  regard  the  "  universals  "  or  the  "  Ideas  "  as  the  most  real 
things  in  the  world.  But  we  shall  also  there  suggest  that 
these  "  Ideas  "  cannot  for  one  moment  be  thought  of  apart 
from  the  reality  of  human  purpose  and  human  life.  The 
letter  of  Schopenhauer's  system,  no  doubt,  stands  for  the  fact 
that  all  things,  "  Ideas  "  and  human  purposes  alike,  are  unreal 
in  face  of  the  self-existent  and  eternal  Will,  which  is  the  support 
and  the  reality  of  the  world.  But  if  we  can  somehow  show 
that  the  cosmic  will  expresses  itself  most  fully  in  the  person- 
ality of  man  and  in  the  purposes  of  man,  we  shall  be  warranted 
in  selecting  the  purposes  of  man  and  the  volition  of  man  as 
the  reality  under  which  all  other  realities  may  be  graded. 


108  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Schopenhauer  has  pointed  out  what  he  considers  to  be  the 
various  grades  of  reality,  or  at  least  he  has  suggested  the 
idea  that  we  should  grade  reality  in  accordance  with  the 
modes  of  the  working  of  the  world-will.  The  will  has  mani- 
fested itself  in  many  different  forms  and  in  many  different 
grades  of  potency.  This  grading  of  reality  is  a  most  valuable 
part  of  the  transcendental  idealism  which  we  are  trying  to 
put  forward  as  on  the  whole  the  best  way  of  looking  at  reality. 
All  reality  must  be  shown  to  be  an  expression  of  the 
organic  effort  which  constitutes  the  life  of  the  universe. 
This  conception  will  be  explained  at  greater  length  in  the 
chapters  that  follow. 

The  will,  in  the  language  of  Schopenhauer,  has  expressed 
itself  in  various  grades,  from  the  "  simple  forces  of  nature " 
exemplified  in  gravitation  and  cohesion  and  the  various  atomic 
forces,  up  through  the  "  various  forms  of  animal  and  vegetable 
life "  to  motived  action  in  the  case  of  man.^  Schopenhauer 
uses  the  expression  "  Platonic  Ideas  "  to  represent  the  "  differ- 
ent grades  of  the  objectification  of  the  will."  The  "  different 
species,"  the  enduring  forms  of  organised  nature,  exhibit  them- 
selves —  he  holds  —  in  a  graduated  succession  or  series,  in 
which  the  higher  species  or  forms  are  always  a  more  perfect 
and  distinct  assertion  of  the  will  to  live  than  the  lower.  Every 
individual  being  needs  will-power,  so  that  the  form  of  life 
which  it  represents  shall  be  victorious  over  lower  forms  of 
life.  The  organic  and  vital  forces  that  are  at  work  for  some 
time  in  the  human  body  must  be  strong  enough  to  overcome 
the  physical  and  chemical  forces.  Each  individual  organism, 
according  to  Schopenhauer,  represents  a  "  grade  of  the  objec- 
tification of  the  will,"  the  "  Idea,"  of  its  "  species " ;  but  the 

^  It  is  useful,  witli  a  view  to  an  understanding  of  Schopenhauer,  to  try  to  think 
of  our  conduct  as  in  a  sense  an  expenditure  of  cosmic  force,  and  a  consummation, 
as  it  were,  of  the  various  forces  that  are  at  work  in  the  world. 


SCHOPENHAUER   AND   IDEALISM.  109 

"  species,"  the  "  Idea,"  the  "  grade  of  the  will,"  is  migh^er 
than  any  one  assertion  of  it  that  is  apparent  in  time  and 
space.  The  will  has  expressed  itself  in  the  various  grades 
of  existence  and  life  that  we  see.  All  these  grades  of  life  are 
relatively  permanent,  and  the  grade  of  life  that  is  exemplified 
in  the  will  of  man  is  the  highest  assertion  of  the  world-will 
that  we  know  of.  The  intellect  that  exists  in  the  brain  of 
man  lights  up  all  the  rest  of  existence,  and  makes  us  aware 
of  the  different  forms  in  which  the  will  has  asserted  its  life. 
Schopenhauer  would  say  that  the  intellect  brings  only  con- 
fusion into  the  world  by  making  man  think  that  he  is 
different  from  other  beings  and  things  in  the  world.  We 
should  prefer  to  say  that  the  intellect  shows  us  the  various 
things  in  the  world  which  have  fallen  short  of  the  higher 
reality  that  is  shadowed  forth  in  our  own  tentative  but  ever 
more  perfect  and  successful  efforts  after  life.  There  seems, 
then,  every  reason  in  Schopenhauer's  thought  not  only  for 
grading  the  world  into  different  kinds  of  reality,  but  for 
regarding  the  reality  that  expresses  itself  in  the  will  of  man 
as  the  highest  kind  of  reality.  The  foundations  are  thus  laid 
for  a  complete  scheme  of  transcendental  philosophy  or  tran- 
sccndcntal  idealism.  He  uses  the  highest  grade  or  manifesta- 
tion of  the  will  to  interpret  and  explain  all  the  other  grades 
of  the  will  or  of  existence.  In  view  of  the  perfect  human 
being  all  other  existence  seems  phenomenal  and  ideal.  All 
other  things  exist,  not  for  tliemselves,  but  for  man  as  the 
consummation  of  all  reality.  We  may  then  deny  the  absolute 
reality  of  beings  and  things  which  fall  short  of  the  reality  of 
the  human  personality.  In  this  sense  of  idealism  perhaps 
many  more  people  are  idealists  than  those  who  call  them- 
selves by  that  name. 

We  already  see  that  the  supreme  difficulty  in  Schopenhauer 
is  to  connect  his  disparagement  of  the  intellect  (as  somehow 
falsifying  things)  with  his  view  of  the  intellect  as  a  tool  in 


110  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  service  of  the  will.  It  is  not  in  the  intellect,  according 
to  Schopenhauer,  but  in  the  will  that  the  meaning  of  reality 
is  to  be  read.  Now  it  is  wrong  to  say  that  the  intellect  re- 
veals only  "  ideas  "  which  are  the  "  effects  "  of  the  action  of 
things  upon  it ;  it  reveals  things  and  other  beings  in  their  re- 
lation to  my  will.  Thus  in  harmony  with  Schopenhauer's 
own  fundamental  principle,  the  distinction  between  subject  and 
object  is  not  to  be  viewed  ontologically  but  tdcologically.  This 
means  that  the  reality  of  so-called  tilings  is  measured  by  the 
degree  to  which  they  subserve  that  ultimate  purpose  in  the 
universe  which  man  alone  is  able  to  understand  and  adequately 
realise.  They  are,  if  we  care  to  put  it  so,  ''  phenomenal "  or 
"  ideal "  in  relation  to  the  will  of  man,  inasmuch  as  man 
seems  to  possess  a  higher  kind  of  reality  than  the  reality 
that  they  exhibit.  It  is  absurd  to  ask  what  the  subject 
is  in  itself  and  what  the  object  is  in  itself.  In  fact  the 
attempt  to  study  the  world  in  terms  of  the  distinction  be- 
tween subject  and  object  is  a  miscalculated  attempt.  For  the 
intellect  reveals  to  us  only  the  extent  to  which  things  affect 
our  will ;  and  the  object  is  best  understood,  not  as  a  pheno- 
menon of  the  intellect  but  as  something  which  sustains  a 
relation  to  the  human  will.  If  we  wish  to  introduce  a  real 
"  content "  into  the  merely  logical  distinction  between  the 
subject  and  the  object,  we  must  view  things  dynamically  and 
ask  about  the  relation  that  they  sustain  to  our  will,  whether 
that  is  absolute  or  relative.  The  world-will  sustains  an  ab- 
solute relation  to  my  will — its  volition  determines  my  reality 
as  a  person ;  all  mere  "  things  "  sustain  only  a  relative  relation 
to  my  will — they  can  be  used  by  me  as  instruments  or  tools. 

The  outcome  of  transcendental  idealism  would  thus  seem  to 
be  that  human  persons  and  the  supreme  will  of  the  universe 
are  the  only  ultimate  existences.  With  the  question  of  what 
the  world  is  apart  from  human  purposes  we  cannot  possibly 
have  anything  to  do.     The  sense  of  things  that  we  have  in 


SCHOPENHAUER  AND   IDEALISM.  Ill 

our  volition  is  for  us  the  best  instrument  by  which  we  can 
interpret  reality.     The  vulgar  have  always  felt  this,  and  so 
far  have  all  along  been   superior  to  the  philosophers,  who 
rarely  get   beyond  the  abstract  conceptions  of  the  intellect, 
because^  they  have  lost  sight  of   the  fact  that  the  intellect 
IS  nothing  on  its   own   account   but  only  a  tool  or  servant 
of  the  will.      The  "transcendental  reality"  of  the  world  is 
to  be  found  in  will,  and  the  highest  form  of  reality  may  be 
said  to  be  the  conscious  or  rational  will  of  man.      This  is 
substantially  the  teaching  of  Schopenhauer  himself;  and  it 
all,  in  a  sense,  comes  out  of  his  attitude  to  the  "  ideal  system." 
He  simply  diverged  from  ordinary  idealism  to  iind  the  reality 
of  things   in    will.      It    is    impossible    to    construct    a    real 
idealism  so  long  as  we  keep  merely  to  the  plane  of  the  in- 
tellect.    If  we  stay  there  we  shall  get  into  nothing  but  illu- 
sionism,  for  the  intellect  is  really  nothing  on  its  own  account ; 
it  only  "  lights  up  "  for  us  the  relations  that  things  sustain 
to  our  will.     In  the  relations  that  things  sustain  to  our  will, 
i.:  the  various  "grades  of  reality,"  and  in  the  fact  that  the' 
will  of  man  seems  to  represent  the  highest  "grade  of  reality," 
we  have  a  complete  scheme  of  transcendental  idealism   or 
transcendental  realism,  just  as  we  please  to  call  it. 


112 


CHAPTER    III. 

SCIIOPIINIIAUEU'S    THEORY    OF   KNOWLEDGE. 

"  In  my  chief  work  I  have  shown  that  tlie  thing  in  itself — i.e.,  whatever, 
on  the  whole,  exists  independently  of  our  representation— cannot  he  got  at 
by  way  of  representation,  but  that,  to  reach  it,  we  must  follow  quite  a  dif- 
ferent path,  leading  through  the  inside  of  things,  which  lets  us  into  the 
citadel,  as  it  were,  by  treachery." — 'The  Fourfold  Root,'  etc. 

"A  Reason,  on  the  other  hand,  which  supplies  material  knowledge  prim- 
arily out  of  its  own  resources,  and  conveys  positive  information  transcend- 
ing the  sphere  of  possible  experience  ;  a  Reason  which,  in  order  to  do  this, 
must  necessarily  contain  innate  ideas,  is  a  pure  fiction,  invented  by  .  .  . 
and  a  product  of  the  terror  with  which  Kant's  'Criticism  of  Pure  Reason' 
has  inspired." — Ibid. 

In  the  preceding  chapter  we  have  seen  how  the  study  of 
Schopenhauer's  attitude  to  the  philosophy  of  idealism  centred 
or  culminated  in  the  examination  of  his  opinions  on  the 
nature  and  reality  of  knowledge.  In  the  present  chapter  we 
shall  seek  to  pursue  this  examination  in  more  detail.  But 
Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge  is  also  interesting  for  a 
more  general  reason.  To  many  who  have  learned  Kant's 
lesson,  the  shortest  way  of  estimating  the  value  of  any  phil- 
osophical system  is  to  discover  and  criticise  the  views  it  is 
inclined  to  take  of  the  nature  and  the  reality  of  knowledge. 
Schopenhauer's  system  lends  itself  very  easily  to  this  kind  of 
examination,  as  Schopenhauer  professed,  with  some  reason, 
to  teach  the  problem  of  philosophy  through  an  initial  accept- 
ance of  Kant's  main  theoretical  principles.     So  far  as  the  pure 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.      113 

theory  of  knowledge  goes  he  stands  midway  between  Kant 
and  those  of  Kant's  followers  who  proceeded,  against  the 
warnings  of  Kant  himself,  to  convert  the  Critical  .I'hilosophy 
into  a  new  and  positive  system  of  truth,  called  Transcendental 
Philosophy.  We  liave  hinted  that  Schopenhauer  learned  from 
Kant,  better  than  most  of  Kant's  successors,  the  real  difticulty 
— if  not  the  practical  impossibility — of  attempting  to  foist  on 
hunian  thought,  by  way  of  a  pliilosophy  of  reality,  anything  at 
all  akin  to  the  old  ontology,  with  its  professed  knowledge  of 
entities  that  are  ordinarily  supposed  to  transcend  human  know- 
ledge, Schopenhauer's  philosophy,  like  Kant's,  is,  in  the  tirst 
instance  at  least,  almost  more  epistemology  or  theory  of  know- 
ledge than  metaphysic.  It  is  only  when  we  interpret  Scliop- 
enhauer  in  the  light  of  the  positive  fac^s  over  which  his 
philosophy  confusedly  stumbi'^d,  that  his  doctrine  becomes  in 
some  sense  a  real  description  of  the  facts  of  life.  Still  liis 
epistemology  is  instructive  oiougii  in  itself.  We  learn  here, 
better  than  anywhere  else,  his  soli'^'  reasons  for  protesting 
against  his  contemporaries  Schelling  and  Hegel,  and  at  the 
same  time  the  reasons  of  the  illusionism  which  characterises 
his  own  positive  thinking. 

Schopenhauer  learned  from  Kant  the  main  ideas  and  prin- 
ciples of  the  Critical  Philosophy,  and  the  critical  idea  always 
dominated  his  mind — in  a  positive  way  so  far  as  "phenomena" 
were  concerned,  and  in  a  negative  way  so  far  as  "  nouraena  " 
were  concerned.  In  his  '  Fourfold  Koot  of  the  Principle  of 
Sufficient  Eeason  '  he  expands  Kant's  idea  of  certain  categories 
appropriate  to  certain  realms  of  fact,  and  the  whole  book  may 
be  regarded  as  an  attempt  to  connect  the  categories  in  some 
sort  of  system.  It  has  many  merits  into  which  one  cannot 
here  go  in  detail,  the  chief  of  these  being  its  extreme  exact- 
nes3  of  conception  and  execution ;  its  scholarly  and  critical 
introduction ;  its  more  faithful  adherence  to  the  idealistic  point 
of  view  than  we  find  in  Kant ;  and  its  partial  abandonment  of 

H 


114  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  "  faculty-psychology,"  in  treating,  not  so  much  of  differeiit 
mental  faculties  as  of  groups  of  mental  "representations" 
(ideas)  corresponding  to  objects  in  some  such  way  as  Spinoza's 
iilca  to  its  ideatum.  It  shows  us  that  there  are  four  kinds  of 
necessity — physical,  mathematical,  logical,  and  moral — these 
being  the  four  roots  of  the  Principle  of  Sufficient  Reason, 
which  is  the  siiprenu;  principle  of  all  knowledge.  The  pheno- 
menal world  is  to  be  explained  by  these  four  kinds  of  neces- 
sity, each  phenomenal  object  or  thing  by  its  own  kind  of 
necessity  ;  a  physical  object,  for  example,  by  the  law  of  causal- 
ity, or  a  moral  fact  by  reference  to  the  will  of  man,  and  so  on. 
All  this  is  perfectly  satisfactory. 

But  just  as  Schopeidiauer  in  his  preliminary  philosophy  of 
reality  (whicli  was  Idcjalism)  always  presu]iposed  that  there 
were  other  things  than  phenomena,  so  in  his  theory  of  know- 
ledge he  presupposed  that  there  was  a  kind  of  knowledge 
different  from,  the  knowledge  reached  by  the  application  of  the 
different  categories  or  principles  of  the  understanding  (cause 
and  space  and  number  and  substance,  and  so  on)  to  the  ordi- 
nary world  of  the  senses.  This  idea  he  borrowed  from  Plato, 
and  it  is  one  of  the  many  grievous  defects  of  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy,  that  while  professedly  a  direct  and  observational 
account  of  reality,  it  contains  more  than  one  preconception 
taken  without  analysis  or  criticism  from  earlier  philosophy. 
Of  course  not  even  the  most  radical  or  naturalistic  account  of 
reality  can  dispense  with  the  past  spiritual  attainments  of  the 
human  mind,  but  Schopenhauer  was  a  vandal  in  the  way  that 
he  treated  the  past  thought  of  humanity,  taking  or  leaving  just 
what  he  pleased,  without  any  respect  for  the  organic  character 
of  human  knowledge  as  a  whole.  Like  his  great  master  Kant, 
ho  was  too  much  concerned  with  creating  a  standard  for  ruling 
irrelevant  philosophy  out  of  court,  to  make  a  really  ])atient 
and  sympathetic  study  of  the  history  of  human  thought  in 
and  for  itself,  and  out  of   relation  if   necessary  to  his  own 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       115 

position  in  it.  Ho  identified  the  "  Ideas  "  or  the  "  universals  " 
of  Plato  with  the  "  grades  "  of  the  objectification  of  the  Will, 
which  modern  natural  science  was  beginning  to  apprehend.^ 
"  The  '  Idea'  is  a  universal  like  the  concept,  but  yet  a  different 
sort  of  universal  altogether  from  this.  The  '  Ideas  *  (in  the 
genuine  and  original  sense  of  the  word  as  introduced  by  Plato) 
are  the  different  species  of  the  objectification  of  the  will  (the 
thing  in  itself).  They  are  expressed  in  numberless  individuals 
as  the  unrealised  types  or  eternal  forms  of  things.  They 
do  not  enter  into  space  and  time,  the  media  of  individual 
things,  but  remain,  subject  to  no  change,  always  being  and 
never  becoming;  while  the  mere  individual  things  come  and 
go,  always  becoming  and  never  being."  ^  Kant's  interest  in 
the  study  of  metaphysics  was  as  to  whether  there  could  be  a 
science  of  the  great  Ideas  of  the  Pure  Reason ;  and  so  was 
Schopenhauer's,  and  almost  in  the  same  way.  The  "  Ideas"  to 
him  were  manifestations  of  the  thing  in  itself  of  the  world,  the 
"most  immediate  objectification"  of  the  world -will;  they 
expressed  the  different  kinds  of  reality  which  the  world-will 
had  evolved  out  of  itself.  We  shall  learn  what  an  important 
role  he  was  prepared  to  attach,  but  without  .-iuccess,  to  the 


'  I  am  thinking  of  tho  investigations  of  Lamarck  (*  Die  natilrliclio  Stufonord- 
nung ')  and  Cuvicr  ('  IVincipe  do  la  Hub()rdiiiatir)n  des  caractisres'),  whicii  iielpcd 
forwards  tiio  suhHtitutiou  of  natural  for  artificial  (Linnd)  classification  in  "natural 
history."  Cuvier's  famous  treatise  'Sur  un  nouvcau  ropprochomont  h  dtahlir 
untre  les  clivsses  (jui  com[M)8ent  lo  r^gne  animal'  appeared  in  1812 — four  ycai-s 
before  Schopenhauer  went  to  Dresden  to  write  out  in  peace  his  '  World  as  Will,' 
and  St  Hilaire's  'Sur  lo  principe  dc  composition  organique '  in  1828 — two  or 
throe  years  before  Schopenhauer  went  to  Krankfort  to  pass  the  last  lia^f  of  liia 
life,  to  survey  as  it  were  from  a  watch-tower  the  gradual  conversion  of  Germany 
from  philosophy  to  biology.  (He  foresaw  the  pessimism  that  would  come  by 
way  of  recoil  from  the  gospel  of  mere  science.)  There  is  evidence  in  Schopen- 
hauer's writings  that  ho  studied  Cuviar  and  Lamarck.  It  has  always  seemed  to 
mo  that  Schopenhauer's  blind  will,  trying  to  express  itself  in  many  ways,  an<l 
finally  to  transcend  itself  in  a  spiritual  or  ideal  life  among  human  beings,  is 
closely  connected  with  the  effort  afterlife  which  the  natural  science  of  tho  century 
has  tried  to  understand. 

»  Die  Welt  aU  Wille,  &c.,  j.  164. 


116  Schopenhauer's  SYSTEM. 

Platonic  Ideas.^  We  have  here  simply  to  chronicle  the  bare 
fact  that  he  adopted  them  as  a  part  of  his  theory  of  know- 
ledge— i.e.,  a  part  of  the  apparatus  of  first  principles  with 
which  he  undertook  to  construe  reality. 

Schopenhauer  used,  then,  the  principles  of  Kant  and  of 
Plato  to  interpret  reality.  The  categories  of  Kant,  he  thought, 
explained  phenomenal  things  and  phenomenal  knowledge ; 
while  the  "  Ideas "  of  Plato  explained  supra  -  phenomenal 
things  and  supra -phenomenal  knowledge.  The  best  way  to 
follow  Schopenhauer  in  his  train  of  thought  is  to  consider  a 
fundamental  charge  he  felt  inclined  to  make  against  Kant's 
whole  procedure.  The  fundamental  principle  of  Kant's 
method  he  takes  to  be  the  "starting  from  indirect  or  reflective 
knowledge " ;  philosophy  is  for  Kant  a  science  of  (or  out  of) 
conceptions,  while  for  Schopenhauer  it  is  a  science  in  concep- 
tions. By  this  he  means  that  Kant  found  in  conceptions 
the  subject-matter  of  philosophy,  while  he  (Schopenhauer) 
found  in  conceptions  only  the  form  of  philosophy — philosophy 
being  a  conceptiialised  or  generalised  statement  of  the  matter 
of  our  knowledge,  of  ordinary  reality."  Kant  further,  Schopen- 
hauer holds,  actually  tried  to  find  in  conceptions  the  ultimate 
elements  of  reality,  or  at  least  tried  to  find  in  conceptual 
knowledge  the  explanation  also  of  intuitive  or  immediate 
knowledge.  This  is  why  Kant  failed,  he  thought,  to  find  the 
thing  in  itself  or  things  in  themselves ;  Kant,  that  is,  simply 
could  not  find  the  last  or  the  simplest  and  the  most  funda- 
mental realities,  because  he  implicitly  took  them  to  be  co7i- 
ceptions  or  abstractions  of  thought  or  ideas. 

It  is  the  nature  of  this  charge  in  itself,  almost  more  than 
its  truth  or  its  error  as  directed  against  Kant,  that  ought  to 
interest  us,  although  it  is  in  part,  at  least,  certainly  relevant. 
It  is  not  strictly  true  that  the  real  reason  for  Kant's  being 

^  Cf.  chaps.  V,  and  vi.  passim. 
— ,-r-^-——~     •^  See  '  Mind,'  xvi.  359;  article  by  the  present  writer. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.      117 

left  with  the  thing  in  itself  as  the  ultimate  insolubility  of 
philosophy  was  his  use  of  the  abstract  method ;  but  rather 
that  Kant,  like  Schopenhauer,  thought  that  somehow  know- 
ledge changed  things  for  us  in  the  very  process  of  knowing, 
and  that  consequently  we  never  could  in  mere  knoioledge 
attain  to  reality.  Still  Schopenhauer's  polemic  against  the 
concept  as  Kant's  chief  instrument  of  philosophising  led  him 
finally  to  a  view  of  knowledge  which  frees  us  from  the  puzzles 
of  the  idealistic  difficulty  about  Icnowledg  somehow  falsifying 
things,  although  he  himself  can  hardly  be  said  to  have  realised 
this.  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is,  on  its  very  face,  a  polemic 
against  the  philosophy  of  the  idea,  and  a  plea  for  the  substitu- 
tion in  its  place  of  the  philosophy  of  the  will  or  of  the  prac- 
tical and  the  unconscious  or  even  of  the  non-rational.  This 
means  that  in  his  thinking  he  fought  both  against  the  idea- 
philosophy  or  the  idealism  in  which  the  things  of  sense 
seemed  to  be  made  out  to  be  mere  ideas  of  the  subject 
(even  although  he  himself  was  at  least  inclined  to  accept 
this  philosophy  to  a  certain  extent)  and  against  the  con- 
cept-philosophy of  the  rational  philosophers  who  tended  in 
general  to  seek  an  explanation  of  things  in  the  entities  of 
thought.  In  reading  Schopenhauer  one  feels  that  it  is  difficult 
to  say  to  which  of  these  two  lines  of  thought  he  had  the 
greater  antipathy.  Each  of  them  he  felt  rather  than  clearly 
saw  to  be  inadequate  as  a  final  philosophy  of  reality.  True, 
he  thought  of  the  world  as  in  the  first  instance  "  the  idea  of 
the  subject,"  but  he  felt  at  once  it  must  be  something  more 
than  that.  Philosophy  was  doubtless  "a  science  in  concep- 
tions," but  it  could  not,  after  Kant,  be  made  "  a  science  out 
of  conceptions."  One  sometimes  feels  that  the  acrimony  or 
the  casual  indifference  with  which  Schopenhauer  treats  one 
of  these  two  kinds  of  dogmatic  philosophy  is  only  explicable 
when  we  consider  that  he  is  implicitly  thinking  of  the  wrong- 
ness  also  of  the  other.     For  him,  in  short,  the  idea-philosophy 


118  Schopenhauer's  system. 

stocil  doubly  condemned  :  first,  in  so  far  as  it  refers  to  ordinary 
things  (which  are  surely  more  than  mere  ideas) ;  and  second,  in 
so  far  as  it  refers  to  concepts  or  ideas  in  the  strict  sense  (which 
are  only  indirectly  related  to  reality).  It  is  with  the  latter 
kind  of  dogmatism  that  we  are  more  immediately  concerned 
just  now.  A  philosophy  of  the  idea  or  concept  is  always 
illusory  to  Schopenhauer,  always  too  indirect  a  way  of 
getting  at  reality.^  And  so  his  polemic  against  the  dog- 
matic use  of  ideas  or  concepts  is  the  main  part  of  his  criti- 
cism of  Kant. 

I.  It  is  one  of  the  main  tendencies  of  Schopenhauer's 
thought  to  seek  to  overturn  the  whole  philosophy  of  the 
concept.  "  Since  the  days  of  Socrates  philosophy  has  been  a 
systematic  misuse  of  general  conceptions."  Both  the  Posi- 
tivist  and  the  Pessimist  have  profound  sympathy  with  this 
statement.  The  one  feels  the  unsatisfactoriness  of  all  explana- 
tion of  things  by  "  quiddities  "  and  "  essences  "  and  conceptions, 
and  the  other  feels  the  profound  pettiness  and  thinness  of  all 
merely  abstract  views  and  theories  of  life  in  face  of  the  rend- 
ing force  of  reality  and  real  life.  In  Schopenhauer  the  mean- 
ing of  things  is  always  something  that  one  feels  and  sees  rather 
tluxn  thinks  and  infers.  One  can  explain  this  to  some  extent 
in  the  language  of  psychology  and  epistemology,  by  unfolding 
Schopenhauer's  opinions  on  the  three  important  elements  of 
knowledge  known  as  the  perception,  and  the  conception,  and 
the  pure  Idea. 

By  perceptions  or  percepts,  Schopenhauer  means  on  the 
whole  our  concrete  intuitions  of  the  things  of  the  real  world, 
our  complete  and  rounded  perceptions  of  ordinary  reality,  of 
individual  objects,  of  animals  and  men  and  things.     He  pre- 

^  Cf.  infra.  Chapter  vii.  will  speak  of  Schopenhauer's  conviction  that  the  con- 
ccpt  is  unequal  to  the  spiritual  depth  of  religious  mysticism.  Chapters  viii.  and 
ix.  also  refer  incidentally  to  the  illusionism  that  springs  out  of  an  excess  of  concep- 
tualism  or  mere  thought. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       119 

supposes,  as  a  follower  of  Kant,  that  perceptions  are  synthe- 
tised  or  focussed  sensations,  but  beyond  this,  unfortunately, 
his  psychology  of  sensation  does  not  go.  This  is  not  so  great 
a  drawback  as  it  might  be,  however,  for  the  reason  that 
Schopenhauer's  treatment  of  sensation  is  essentially  meta- 
physical. Sensations  are  to  him  a  "  confused  manifold," 
elements  of  knowledge  that  are  "  nothing  "  for  us  apart  from 
the  synthetic  activity  of  the  understanding.^  Perception,  as  it 
were,  implies  the  intellect — not  the  reason,  but  the  under- 
standing with  its  arrangements  of  things  into  a  causal  order. 
That  is,  Schopenhauer  as  a  Kantian  never  thinks  of  sense- 
perception  as  possible  save  through  the  interpretative  activity 
of  the  mind  —  i.e.,  through  the  applications  of  the  "  cate- 
gories "  to  reality.  As  the  categories  are  not  merely  co7i- 
ccptions  to  Schopenhauer,  we  may  not  object  to  his  saying  that 
perceptions  are  possible  without  abstract  conceptions,  without 
the  reason.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  perceptions  of  ordinary 
things  perhaps  are ;  but  there  are  some  perceptions,  such  as 
the  perceptions  of  the  causal  relation,  or  of  goodness,  or  of 
beauty,  which  are  not  possible  without  the  exercise  to  some 
extent  at  least  of  the  reason.  These  things,  however,  are 
a  second  kind  of  perceptions  to  Schopenhauer,  corresponding 
to  the  power  that  we  have  of  perceiving  what  he  calls  the 
"  Platonic  Ideas."  He  did  not  see  the  place  of  the  reason  or 
of  our  rational  consciousness  in  helping  us  to  attain  to  these 
intuitions  of  beauty  and  goodness  and  truth.  He  forgot  that 
reason  ^  too  may  end  in  giving  us  certain  intuitions,  just  as 
sense  gives  us  intuitions  or  perceptions ;  and  just  because  he 
tried  to  separate  too  rigidly  and  too  widely  the  higher  per- 
ceptions of  the   mind   from  reason,   he   is   largely  unable   to 

^  "  In  fact  the  Benses  supply  nothing  but  the  raw  mat«rial8  which  the  under- 
standing iit  once  proceeds  to  work  up,"  &c. — '  The  Fourfold  iioot,'  &c. 

-  Professor  Fraser,  in  his  works  on  Berkeley  and  Locke,  often  suggests  that  reason 
when  really  pure  is  akin  to  sense-perception  or  Common-Sense,  and  the  Scottish 
philosophers  in  their  identification  of  reason  with  Common-Sense  express  this  idea. 


120  Schopenhauer's  system. 

describe  the  Ideas  of  art  and  religion  and  ethics  in  anything 
else  than  negatives.  We  shall  see  this  when  we  come  to  treat 
of  these  things.  The  perception  of  a  work  of  art,  according  to 
Schopenhauer,  really  takes  us  out  of  the  world.  Some  people, 
on  the  contrary,  feel  that  the  perception  of  a  work  of  art  gives 
the  mind  a  deeper  insight  into  the  world,  at  the  same  time  that 
it  may  seem  in  a  certain  way  to  carry  us  beyond  mere  matter 
of  fact.  Schopenhauer,  however,  was  so  anxious  to  separate 
perception  from  reason  that  he  paid  the  penalty  incident  to 
this  in  the  palpable  unintelligibility  of  his  views  about  the 
nature  of  artistic  reality.^  His  excess  of  Platonism  rendered 
him  incapable  of  stating  clearly  what  ordinary  perceptions 
are,  or  what  artistic  reality  is. 

In  general  it  will  be  found  that  when  we  are  describing 
knowledge,  no  one  element  of  knowledge  can  be  fully  ex- 
plained without  considering  its  relation  to  all  the  other  chief 
elements  of  knowledge.  Schopenhauer  did  not  always  re- 
member this.  He  saw  the  relations  of  perception  and  under- 
standing better  than  he  did  the  relations  of  perception  and 
reason,  or  understanding  and  reason.  The  good  of  this  was, 
as  has  been  hinted,  that  he  always  saw  the  function  of  the 
intellect  in  sense,  and  that  he  took  the  main  function  of  the 
understanding  to  be  the  unravelling  of  the  connections  and 
relations  among  given  things.  That  is,  he  was  free  from  the 
dangers  of  a  merely  sensationalistic  philosophy  in  the  first 
instance,  and  from  the  dangers  of  a  merely  rationalistic  philo- 
sophy in  the  second.  The  understanding  in  man  is  akin, 
according  to  Schopenhauer,  to  the  understanding  in  the 
brutes :  it  is  concerned  only  in  detecting  the  relations  which 
exist  among  perceived  things,  and  this  merely  for  the  prac- 
tical purposes  of  life.  The  understanding,  for  example,  cannot 
be  made  an  organ  of  philosophy  or  speculation,  because,  from 
first  to  last,  it  knows  things  only  in  the  relations  they  sustain 

'  ^  Cf.  chaps.  V.  and  vi. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.      121 

to  each  other  and  to  the  self.  When  we  come  to  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy  of  religion,  we  shall  see  that  he  disparages 
altogether  the  use  of  the  mere  understanding  to  fathom  the 
mysteries  of  religion ;  and  he  is  perfectly  right  in  this.  Per- 
ception (as  implying,  of  course,  the  rational  activity  of  the 
understanding)  remains  for  Schopenhauer  the  type  of  all  real 
knowledge,  and  if  we  are  to  know  higher  things  we  must  have 
some  perception  of  them  too — reason  is  not  equal  to  thinking 
them  out.  Thus  the  God  of  mere  reason  is  only  "  The 
Absolute "  and  not  a  living  reality,  and  Schopenhauer  de- 
spises the  purely  formal  theology  of  the  transcendental  phil- 
osophers. In  whatever  way  we  may  in  a  given  case  attain  to 
perceptual  knowledge,  our  most  real  knowledge  is  always  per- 
ceptual for  Schopenhauer.  One  of  the  most  serious  questions 
in  Schopenhauer  is  whether,  when  perception  or  the  possibility 
of  perception  passes  away,  we  are  entitled  to  talk  of  having 
knowledge  at  all.  The  literal  outcome  of  his  views  upon 
knowledge  would  be  that  we  certainly  are  not.  All  concep- 
tual knowledge,  he  holds,  ultimately  comes  from  perception. 
We  cannot  talk  about  knowing  things  or  beings  which  have 
never  in  any  way  come  under  our  power  of  perceptual  appre- 
hension. Philosophy,  for  example,  can  attain  to  a  knowledge 
of  God  only  in  so  far  as  it  finds  God  revealed  in  man's  own 
nature. 

The  main  drift  of  what  Schopenhauer  says  about  the 
concept  has  tlie  simplicity  and  convincingness  of  an  elemental 
truth  apprehended  in  childhood.  It  is  as  near  the  truth 
as  it  can  be ;  although  when  he  has  to  think  of  the  relation 
of  the  "  concept "  to  the  "  percept "  and  to  the  "  Idea  "  he  is 
hopelessly  at  sea.  The  conception,  he  says,  is  the  "  abstract " 
or  "  general "  idea,  which  is  liberated  by  the  power  of  thought 
from  single  perceptions  and  isolated  instances.  Sc'iopenhauer 
here  stands  on  the  ground  of  the  old  psychology  of  Wolff 
and  the  Scholastics  with  all  its  crudities  and  all  its  defects. 


122  Schopenhauer's  system. 

His  concept  is  the  old  class-universal,  and  its  utility  is  best 
seen  by  thinking  of  what  he  considers  to  be  its  chief  use. 
"  We  perceive  one  thing  and  think  another.  The  beasts  have 
knowledge  of  perception  but  no  abstract  knowledge.  Hence 
the  brutes  have  infinitely  less  to  suffer  than  we  have,  because 
they  have  no  other  pains  than  those  of  the  present.  The  one 
great  advantage  of  the  conception  is  that  it  is  free  from  the 
power  of  time.  In  the  conception  experience  is  stored  up, 
and  this  is  the  only  real  reason  for  subjecting  ourselves  to 
reason  as  the  Stoics  teach.  The  essential  condition  of  sur- 
passing others  in  actual  life  is  that  we  should  reflect  or 
deliberate.  For  the  immediate  action  that  has  been  guided 
by  correct  conceptions  will,  in  the  result,  coincide  with  the 
real  object  aimed  at."  All  this,  without  going  into  par- 
ticulars, has  the  simplicity  of  fact.  We  do  have  abstract 
or  general  ideas,  and  these  come  somehow  from  perceptions. 
There  are,  further,  no  abstract  ideas  or  conceptions  which 
have  not  come  somehow  from  perceptions.  Locke  offered 
to  show  this  directly,  and  Kant  demonstrated  it  indirectly, 
as  Schopenhauer  often  reminds  us.  And  lastly,  it  will  be 
found  that  the  main  utility  of  conceptions  is  a  practical 
utility  and  not  a  speculative  one ;  we  can  in  conceptions 
summarise  reality  in  a  few  simple  pictures,  as  it  were,  but 
pictures  always  remain  pictures.  In  other  words,  concep- 
tions are  always  an  indirect  way  of  knowing  reality.  It  is 
a  poor  thing,  after  all,  to  be  able  only  to  think  the  world. 
Much  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  devoted  to  showing 
the  inadequacy  of  so-called  philosophy,  or  the  helplessness 
of  the  mere  concept  or  idea  to  even  express — much  less  ex- 
plain,  as  the  Hegelians  say — reality.  The  struggle  and  the 
misery  and  the  strife  of  ordinary  life  is  something  to  which 
the  mere  Idea  as  such  is  certainly  inadequate.  Philosophy 
has  often  acted  as  if  our  conceptions  and  ott  thoughts  had 
to  "  conquer "  things,  ignoring  the  fact  that  consciousness  is 


SCHOPENHAUER  S   THEORY   OF   KNOWLEDGE.         123 

only  the  accompaniment  of  a  small  part  of  life.  In  doing 
so  it  has,  to  say  the  least,  forgotten  the  spirit  of  the  Baconian 
philosophy. 

Schopenhauer  never  talks,  or  at  any  rate  never  means  to 
talk,  of  the  "  idea  "  of  a  thing  before  at  least  looking  at  the 
thing  itself,  and  the  best  example  of  this  is  the  fact  that 
his  supreme  principle  will  is  to  him  firstly  a  perception, 
something  that  can  be  observed,  before  it  becomes  a  rational 
principle,  sometliing  under  which  all  reality  has  to  be  con- 
strued. Since  Socrates,  he  would  put  it,  men  have  forgotten 
that  the  value  of  the  concept  is  not  primarily  ontological  but 
teleological ;  we  really  ask  about  the  "  what "  of  things  only 
to  determine  their  practical  value  for  us,  their  value  relatively 
to  the  ends  of  our  will.  Bacon  wrote  this  fact  "  in  large 
letters "  over  the  face  of  his  whole  philosophy,  but  the 
Hegelian  metaphysic  practically  ignored  it.  And  the  philo- 
sophy, too,  of  Kant,  "  dcr  alles  Zermalmende,"  is  in  the  first 
place  the  substitution  of  a  regulative  and  verifiable  philo- 
sophy for  the  old  dogmatic  concept-philosophy  or  theology. 
Schopenhauer  is  in  the  line  at  once  of  Kant  and  of  nine- 
teenth-century evolutionism,  in  substituting  the  question  of 
the  regulative  value  of  conceptions  for  the  absurd  question 
as  to  whether  there  are  or  are  not  entities  corresponding  to 
our  mere  conceptions  or  ideas.  How  he  does  this  is  to  be 
gathered  from  the  trend  of  his  system  as  a  whole,  from  his 
positive  treatment  of  his  supreme  generalisation  will 

One  very  definite  thing  needs  to  be  said  about  Schopen- 
hauer's treatment  of  the  concept,  and  that  by  way  of  apology. 
Seeing  that  Schopenhauer,  at  least  in  the  polemical  aspects  of 
his  philosophy,  started  from  that  crude  psychological  philo- 
sophy which  placed  thought  over  against  things,  he  is  generally 
far  too  apt  to  depreciate  the  concept,  to  proclaim  its  flagrant 
inadequacy  to  life  rather  than  to  set  forth  even  the  limited  and 
relative  and  practical  value  he  is   willing  to  concede  to  it. 


124  Schopenhauer's  system. 

"  Reason  is  needed  in  the  full  stress  of  life,  when  quick 
conclusions,  bold  action,  rapid  and  sure  comprehension  are 
required;  but  it  may  easily  spoil  all  if  it  gains  the  upper 
hand,  and  by  perplexing  hinders  the  intuitive  direct  discovery, 
and  grasp  of  the  right  by  simple  understanding,  and  thus 
induces  irresolution."  Schopenhauer  shows  the  practical 
utility  of  reason  to  a  certain  extent  in  his  whole  philosophy, 
yet  he  never  quite  corrected  his  initial  error  of  viewing 
thought  as  originally  outside  things.  As  a  matter  of  fact, 
thought  is  not  outside  things,  but  latent  in  them.  My 
thought  comes  out  of  my  organic  consciousness,  and  my  or- 
ganic consciousness  comes  out  of  the  organic  life  of  the 
world  as  a  whole ;  so  that  my  thought,  when  I  am  healthy 
— only  when  I  am  healthy — is  a  quasi  focus  or  internalisa- 
tion  of  the  life  of  that  world,  and  valuable  therefore  as  a 
kind  of  epitome  of  reality.  Of  course  it  may  be  said  that 
Schopenhauer,  by  his  iconoclastic  treatment  of  the  mere  con- 
cept, bears  indirect  testimony  to  the  fact  that  our  thought 
is  to  be  trusted,  not  when  it  anticipates  reality,  but  only 
when  it  focusses  or  mirrors  reality. 

Bearing  in  mind  what  we  have  just  learned  about  the 
ultimate  source  of  the  concept  in  perception,  we  are  pre- 
pared to  think  that  if  there  is  a  higher  kind  of  knowledge 
than  ordinary  or  conceptual  knowledge,  there  must  be  a 
higher  kind  of  perception  to  correspond  with  it,  a  power 
of  perceiving  a  higher  plane  of  reality  than  ordinary  reality. 
And  it  is  so.  There  are,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  the 
Ideas,  and  our  power  of  perceiving  the  Ideas.  The  genesis 
of  the  Ideas  is  something  that  is  never  explained  by  Schopen- 
hauer any  more  than  by  Plato  or  by  Wordsworth.  The  Ideas, 
indeed,  as  regarded  by  Schopenhauer,  cannot  be  said  to  have 
a  genesis  at  all.  One  simply  becomes  aware  of  their  exist- 
ence through  a  kind  of  intellectual  vision.  The  Idea  in  the 
"  Hermes  "  of  Praxiteles  or  in  the  "  Mona  Lisa  "  of  Leonardo 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       125 

da  Vinci  is  recognised  as  eternal  whenever  seen.  The  Ideas, 
he  holds,  have  no  such  practical  utility  as  conceptions  have ; 
they  simply  enable  us  to  see  the  nature  of  the  world  as  we 
do  not  know  it  in  ordinary  perception.  Tliey  thus  enable  us 
to  escape  from  the  world.     But  of  this  again. 

As  Schopenhauer  rigidly  adheres  throughout  his  system 
to  the  Platonic  signification  of  the  Ideas  as  absolute  entities, 
where  the  subjective  and  the  objective  blend  and  become 
indistinguishable,  it  is  enough  at  this  place  to  refer  back 
to  what  we  said  in  the  preceding  chapter  about  the  Ideas. 
They  were  there  presented  in  an  objective  way,  as  denoting 
certain  grades  of  being  or  elemental  modes  of  existence.  We 
ought  here  to  speak  of  the  hwivledge  of  the  Ideas,  of  how  they 
are  apprehended  by  the  mind.  But  these  two  things  are  the 
same  to  Schopenhauer.  The  Ideas  at  once  eternally  are  and 
are  yet  "  generated  "  in  the  mind  by  a  kind  of  spiritual  or 
intellectual  birth.  To  this  birth  we  shall  refer  in  the  chapter 
on  the  philosoph}-  of  art. 

There  is,  however,  the  general  difficulty  (already  partially  ^ 
encountered)  in  regard  to  these  three  mental  elements, 
percept,  concept,  and  Idea,  that  their  relations  to  each  other  are 
not  fully  thought  out  by  Schopenhauer.  Of  course  to  place 
them  in  their  proper  relations  to  each  other,  or  rather  to  relate 
to  each  other  the  planes  or  spheres  of  being  which  these  ele- 
ments of  knowledge  represent,  would  be  to  unfold  "  a  complete 
scheme  of  transcendental  philosophy."  ^  And  this  one  does 
not  find  in  Schopenhauer,  although  the  root  ideas  of  such  a 
scheme  are  certainly  to  be  found  in  him — partly  in  the  way 
he  set  about  classifying  the  categories  as  referring  to  different 
planes  of  experience  or  reality,  and  partly  in  his  notion  of 
different  kinds  of  idealism  (subjective  idealism,  empirical, 
and  transcendental),  and  partly  in  his  idea  of  reducing  all 
planes  of  experience  or  of  being  to  manifestations  of  the  will. 

^  Cf.  supra,  p.  120.  ^  Cf.  infra,  section  iv. 


126  Schopenhauer's  system. 

The  Idea  is  said  by  Schopenhauer  to  be  known  by  a  kind  of 
perception.  His  concept  is  a  mere  "  double "  of  things, 
connected  with  things  in  an  external  and  artificial  sort  of 
way.  Conception  and  perception  always  seem  to  be  regarded 
by  Schopenhauer  as  two  ways  of  knowing  which  we  happen 
to  possess,  it  being  conceivable,  as  it  weie,  that  we  should 
only  have  one  way  of  knowing,  or  four  or  five  ways.  That  is 
why  he  could  never  see  the  relation  of  the  reason  to  ordinary 
things  and  to  life.  Not  only  had  he  not  cleared  up  for 
himself  the  old  difficulties  of  the  Nominalists  and  the  Con- 
ceptualists  (his  "  Ideas  "  connect  him  with  the  old  doctrine  of 
the  Eealists),  but  he  did  not  sufficiently  consider  the  fact  that 
our  conceptual  knowledge  is  not  so  much  a  mere  reflex  of 
our  perceptual  knowledge  as  an  actual  differentiation  from  it, 
and  therefore  a  real  part  of  our  experience.  An  human  beings 
we  live  in  thinking,  or  at  least  partly  live  in  thinking;  in 
thinking  our  experience  we  live  over  again ;  our  thoughts,  too, 
help  us  to  create  new  realities  or  new  forms  of  reality  in 
our  lives.  Fortunately  the  relation  of  the  concept  to  reality 
comes  out  in  Schopenhauer  after  all,  because  the  only  con- 
ceptions he  cares  anything  about  are  the  conceptions  which 
constitute  motives  to  action.  This  is  set  forth  in  the  following 
chapter  and  in  the  chapter  upon  the  ethics  of  his  system. 
Still  he  continues  to  contrast  immediate  knowledge  or  per- 
ception, which  is  "  rich  and  full,"  with  reflective  knowledge, 
which  is  "  partial "  and  "  indirect "  and  "  abstract  "  and 
"  empty."  In  fact,  he  was  ever  eager  to  overturn  the 
philosophy  of  the  concept,  although  he  never  completely 
explained  it.  The  Hegelian  system  dealt,  he  held,  with  barren 
abstractions,  like  "being"  and  "non-being,"  while  his  own 
philosophy  dealt  with  organised  living  reality  as  we  feel  it 
and  perceive  it. 

But  it  is  not  true  that  the  concept  and  the  percept  can  be 
sharply  separated   from  each  other.      Knowledge,  indeed,  as 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       127 

knowledge,  is  always  partly  conceptual  and  partly  perceptual 
at  one  and  the  same  time.  We  use  our  senses  to  see  things, 
but  we  need  our  reason  and  understanding  to  see  the  connec- 
tions among  other  things.  Just  on  account  of  this  divided 
character  of  knowledge,  however,  we  never  hi&io  the  world  as  a 
whole.  We  can  be  said  to  realise  the  world  as  a  whole  only 
in  organic  effort  or  in  our  total  organic  sense  for  reality,  as 
when  we  undertake  anything  which  involves  our  total  physi- 
cal activity.  Indeed  Schopenhauer  stands  for  this  very  thing — 
and  it  is  the  redeeming  feature  of  his  thought,  confused  as  it 
is — that  only  in  a  full  and  total  sense  for  life  can  we  be  said 
to  know  the  world  whole.  The  real  philosopher  ought  to 
strive  more  than  any  other  man  for  richness  and  complexity 
and  totality  in  his  impressions  and  feelings  about  life,  and 
ought  not  to  be  content  with  a  view  of  the  world  that  can  be 
fully  expressed  in  abstract  conceptions.  In  this  sense  life  is 
will,  as  Schopenhauer  puts  it.  It  is  quite  wrong  again  to 
oppose,  as  Schopenhauer  does,  the  artistic  (Platonic)  intu- 
itions of  the  mind  to  conceptual  knowledge  as  sometliing 
vastly  superior  to  it.  No  one  thing,  no  one  plane  of  ex- 
perience, is  as  such  inherently  superior  to  any  other  plane  of 
experience — artistic  insight  to  thought,  for  example.  Schopen- 
hauer, however,  has  the  mobt.  marked  contempt  for  all  ways  of 
knowing  reality  short  of  the  insight  of  pure  genius  and  pure 
art  (which  he  was  fully  convinced  was  his  own  way).  He 
exalts  the  knowledge  of  the  Platonic  Ideas  above  all  other 
kinds  of  knowledge.  This  is  going  too  far.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  artistic  knowledge  enables  us  to  relate  the  view  that  we 
have  of  the  world  in  our  concepts  and  in  our  thoughts  with 
the  knowledge  that  we  have  in  our  perception  of  things  as  in- 
dividuals separate  and  distii  ;t  from  each  other.  Art  mediates 
between  sense  and  understanding,  just  as  it  also  mediates  be- 
tween understanding  and  reason. 

No  doubt  the  whole  history  of  philosophy  is  the  record  of 


128  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  oscillations  of  the  human  understanding  between  the  con- 
ception {Begriff)  and  the  perception  ( Vorstdlumj) ;  and  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy  represents  this  conflict  as  well  as  do  most 
other  systems.  At  one  time  reason  or  the  concept  is  by  him 
made  inferior  to  perception  or  the  direct  sense  for  reality 
that  we  have  in  organic  effort  and  volition ;  and  at  another 
our  instinctive  feelings  and  organic  strivings  are  made  out  by 
him  to  be  as  different  as  possible  from  reason,  under  the 
erroneous  idea  that  their  reality  can  be  saved  or  strengthened 
by  so  doing.  Eeason  is  so  separated  off  from  reality  in 
Schopenhauer  that  it  becomes  empty  and  formal  and  useless, 
and  feeling  or  volition  is  so  separated  off  from  reason  that 
it  becomes  irrational  and  blind  and  altogether  unconscious. 
In  his  desire  to  avoid  the  dangers  of  rationalism  and  the 
concept-philosophy,  Schopenhauer  gives  us  a  philosophy  of 
reality  that  is  at  the  outset  a-logical  or  irrational,  and  in  the 
end  mystical  and  inarticulate.  Throughout  the  body  of  his 
writings  will  is  said  to  be  that  in  which  the  essence  of  man 
and  animals  consists,  and  at  the  end  of  it  the  knowledge  that 
is  said  to  free  us  from  the  blind  striving  of  the  world  is,  as  he 
puts  it,  simply  the  perception  that  everything  is  really  nothing. 
That  is,  he  at  once  depreciates  thought  so  much  as  to  make 
out  brute  and  physical  force  to  be  everything,  and  yet  at  the 
end  of  his  investigation  imagines  that  thought  is  powerful 
enough  to  negate  the  whole  world  and  to  pronounce  it  to  be 
nothing. 

As  we  shall  s^ee,  much  of  pessimism  comes  from  the  sense 
of  illusion  or  from  the  paralysis  of  thought  that  is  produced 
by  the  discovery  of  the  inadequacy  of  any  one  mere  mental 
element  or  mere  intellectual  function  to  the  facts  of  life  and 
reality  as  a  whole,^  and  of  the  inadequacy  of  all  mere  "  ideas  " 
to  the  actual  complexity  of  things.  Elsewhere  we  shall  find 
Schopenhauer  saying,  for  example,  that  "  good "  and  "  bad  " 

^  Cf,  chaps,  ix.  and  x. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       129 

are  not  things  or  qualities  that  are  positively  real  in  the 
world,  but  simply  expressions  denoting  the  relations  of  things 
to  our  wishes.^  He  was  probably  helped  to  this  idea  of  our 
utter  inability  to  fully  characterise  the  world  in  our  ideas  and 
conceptions,  by  the  fact  that  he  regarded,  as  we  have  seen,  all 
the  forms  of  thought  as  purely  subjective — i.e.,  as  applying 
only  to  what  is  in  the  mind  and  not  to  what  is  out  of  it. 
This  idea  of  the  forms  of  thought  as  subjective,  however,  is 
not  contradictory  of  the  main  idea  in  his  Theory  of  Know- 
ledge, that  the  various  forms  or  categories  of  thought  are 
all  real  enough  in  their  appropriate  and  respective  spheres. 
Physical  reality  is  no  more  real  than  moral  reality ;  in  fact 
we  found  Schopenhauer  calling  the  former  "  ideal "  as  depend- 
ing on  our  mind  for  its  very  reality.  And  if  moral  reality 
depends  upon  t'  'C  existence  of  conscious  moral  persons, "  good  " 
is  real  enough  in  its  way,  just  as  "  straight "  and  "  crooked  " 
and  "  beautiful "  are  in  theirs.  The  chief  difficulty  in  con- 
nection with  goodness  is  as  to  what  we  actually  mean  by  it, 
because  thero  must  be  some  equivalent  in  the  nature  of  things 
for  the  expression  "  good."  At  one  time  in  Schopenhauer  the 
brutes  are  said  to  be  superior  to  man  just  because  they  have 
only  perception  and  instinct,  and  see  straight  to  the  mark 
and  "  hit "  it  when  they  aim  at  it ;  at  another  time  the  phil- 
osopher is  made  out  to  have  "  exhausted  "  all  life  in  the  con- 
cept, and  to  be  therefore  superior  to  the  unreflecting  person 
who  has  to  wait  for  experience ;  and  at  another  time  we  are 
shown  the  hopelessness  of  all  mere  conception  or  thought 
when  the  brain  gets  "  tired  out "  ^  and  can  think  no  more ; 

*  Cf.  chap.  vii. 

^  Cf.  such  sentences  as  the  following  :  "  But  what  is  to  be  expected  of  heads, 
of  wliich  even  the  wisest  is  every  night  the  scene  of  the  strangest  and  most 
senseless  dreams,  and  which  has  to  take  up  its  meditations  again  on  awakening 
from  these  ?  Clearly  a  consciousness  which  is  subject  to  such  great  limitations  is 
little  suited  for  solving  the  riddle  of  the  world." — Welt  als  Wille,  ii. ;  Werke,  iii. 
152 ;  H.  and  K.,  ii.  333. 

I 


130  Schopenhauer's  system. 

and  at  another  we  find  that  genius^  alone  is  made  out  to 
have  the  true  insight  into  life,  though  we  are  elsewhere  told 
that  "  genius  is  as  useless  in  the  ordinary  business  of  life  as  a 
telescope  in  a  theatre."  What  is  lacking  in  Schopenhauer  is 
a  proper  theory  of  the  relation  of  abstract  thought  to  concrete 
perception,  and  the  relation  of  the  concept  to  the  percept,  and 
of  both  to  what  he  calls  the  Ideas  or  the  intuitions  of  art  and 
religion  and  morality. 

II.  Eeason  to  Schopenhauer  means  simply  and  solely  the  fact 
of  the  existence  of  conceptions  in  the  human  mind.  To  this 
idea  he  adheres  rigidly  and  unequivocally  throughout  his 
system.  In  spite  of  this  it  must  be  confessed  that  it  is  hard 
to  discover  in  Schopenhauer  what  the  real  utility  of  concep- 
tions exactly  is.  The  theoretical  value  of  reason  is  its  power 
to  give  us  in  conceptions  or  ideas  a  summary  statement  about 
the  nature  of  things.  We  can  fully  estimate  the  extent  to 
which  Schopenhauer  allows  for  this  possible  theoretical  use  of 
reason  only  when  we  consider  his  metaphysical  teaching  as 
a  whole.  And  so  with  the  practical  utility  of  reason.  We 
shall  encounter  that  in  studying  his  ethic  and  his  pessimism. 
I  have  hinted  that  it  is  his  contention  that  all  conceptual 
constructions  of  the  universe  have  mainly  a  practical  value — 
that  is,  a  value  in  so  far  as  they  actually  or  possibly  affect 
our  action.  I  shall  use  the  large  element  of  truth  that  is 
contained  in  this  contention  as  one  of  the  strongest  reasons 
for  a  broad  acceptance  of  Schopenhauer's  teachings  about  life 
as  a  whole.  To  be  sure,  one  always  feels  that  the  use  to 
which  he  puts  reason  is  more  formal  and  preventive  merely 
than  real  and  positive.  He  sympathises,  for  instance,  with 
Stoicism  as  a  "  spiritual  hygiene,  in  accordance  with  which, 

^  "  But  in  the  aristocracy  of  intellect,  aa  in  other  aristocracies,  there  are  many 
thousands  of  plebeians  for  one  nobleman,  many  millions  for  one  prince,  and  the 
great  multitude  of  men  are  mere  populace,  mobs,  rabble,  la  canaille." — Werke, 
iii.  161 ;  H.  and  K,  ii.  342. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       131 

just  as  one  hardens  the  body  against  the  influences  of  wind 
and  weather,  against  fatigue  and  exhaustion,  one  has  also  to 
harden  one's  mind  against  misfortune,  danger,  loss,  injustice, 
malice,  perfidy,  arrogance,  and  the  folly  of  men."  Schopen- 
hauer is  far  more  eloquent,  as  might  perhaps  be  expected  from 
the  general  tenor  of  his  thought,  on  the  dangers  than  on  the 
advantages  of  rational  knowledge  or  conceptions.  "  Having 
become  accessible  to  thought,  man  is  at  once  exposed  to  error." 
"  Eeason  opens  for  him  paths  of  error  into  which  the  beasts 
never  stray."  "  Through  reason  a  new  species  of  motives,  to 
which  the  brute  is  not  accessible,  obtains  power  over  his  will." 
"  These  are  the  abstract  motives,  the  mere  thoughts,  which  are 
by  no  means  always  drawn  from  his  own  experience,  but 
often  come  to  him  only  through  the  talk  and  example  of 
others,  through  tradition  and  literature."  ^  Then  according  to 
Schopenhauer,  the  mere  existence  of  the  power  of  reflection 
in  man  lays  him  open  to  much  more  suffering  than  the 
beasts  are  exposed  to,  for  "  our  greatest  pains  do  not  lie 
in  the  present  as  matter  of  immediate  knowledge  or  feeling, 
but  in  the  reason  in  the  shape  of  abstract  ideas  and  trouble- 
some thoughts,  from  which  the  brute  that  lives  only  in  the 
present,  and  consequently  in  inevitable  thoughtlessness,  is 
completely  free."  Certainly  pain  is  a  greater  evil  to  man 
than  to  the  brutes,  and  the  possibility  of  pain  and  suffering 
is  largely  increased  in  his  case ;  but  this  shows  that  the 
only  real  pain  to  man  is  spiritual  pain,  and  the  numberless 
fears  to  which  he  is  exposed  by  the  thought  of  the  possibility 
of  missing  the  destiny  which  he  has  as  higher  up  on  the  scale 
of  existence  than  the  beasts  "  that  perish."  Be  this  as  it  may, 
a  false  fear  or  a  wrong  opinion  is  so  pernicious,  in  the  eyes  of 
Schopenhauer,  that  it  should  always  be  attacked  and  driven 
out  as   an  enemy  of   mankind.     Nothing,  he  thought,  could 

^  World  as  Will,  Eng.  tranal.,  H.  and  K.,  ii.  241.     I  have  transposed  sen- 
tences to  some  extent. 


132  Schopenhauer's  system. 

make  error  sacred.  "  There  can  be  no  such  thing  as  privileged 
or  sanctioned  error.  The  thinker  ought  to  attack  it,  even  if 
humanity  should  cry  out  with  pain,  like  a  sick  man  whose 
ulcer  the  physician  touches."  Schopenhauer,  for  example,  felt 
bitterly  hostile  to  the  idea  that  man's  natural  reason  should  be 
appealed  to  as  equal  to  prove  the  existence  of  a  First  Cause  or 
personal  God.  He  always  wished  that  the  negative  results  of 
Kant's  teaching  should  be  better  known  in  a  country  like 
England,  and  suggested  that  a  mission  might  be  formed  for 
the  benefit  of  the  English  clergy,  which  should  go  to  them 
with  Kant's  *  Criticism  of  Pure  Eeason '  in  the  one  hand  and 
Strauss's  '  Criticism  of  the  Bible '  {Bihelkritik)  ^  in  the  other. 
But  the  greatest  of  all  errors  to  Schopenhauer  since  the  Chris- 
tian era  is  the  error  of  the  Hegelian  philosophy,  to  think  that 
reason  exists  "  in  and  for  itself,"  and  that  reason  somehow 
generates  reality  out  of  itself. 

Schopenhauer  makes  us  reflect  upon  the  consequences  of 
the  famous  proposition  supposed  to  represent  the  teaching 
of  the  experience  -  philosophy  about  reason :  Nihil  est  in 
iniellcctu  quod  non  prius  fuerit  in  sensu.  It  is  to  be  noted 
that  this  proposition  is  true  as  it  stands,  even  without  the 
equally  famous  addition  of  Leibnitz,  nisi  intelledus  ipse.  It  is 
true  that  there  is  nothing  in  the  intellect  which  was  not  some- 
time a  matter  of  perception ;  the  form  of  the  intellect — that 
which  critics  say  is  left  out  of  the  proposition — is  of  course 
in  the  intellect  from  the  beginning  (the  very  name  intellect 
speaks  of  a  power  of  the  mind  that  informally  different  from 
other  mental  powers) ;  but  the  content  of  the  intellect  comes 
from  experience.  It  may  not  indeed,  after  all,  be  so  fatal  to 
think  that  all  the  content  of  our  perceptions  or  our  concep- 
tions about  things  comes  from  actual  experience  or  from 
sense-perception,  because,  for  one  thing,  we  now  know  per- 
fectly well   that    the   individual  may  be  said  to  inherit  as 

1  Cf.  Parerga,  "  Verauch  u.  Qeistersehen,"  Werke,  v.  286,  287. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       133 

part  of  his  mental  system  somewhat  of  the  experience  of  the 
whole  human  race.  That  experience  gives  him  impulses  and 
tendencies,  desires  and  cravings,  which  his  individual  reason 
can  at  least  take  cognisance  of  and  appreciate  in  some  way. 
But  we  must  go  further  even  than  this  in  the  case  of 
Schopenhauer.  His  negative  treatment  ot  reason,  as  unable 
to  transcend  the  limits  of  experience  (which  some  philosophers, 
in  spite  of  Kant's  warning,  allow  people  to  think  it  can  do),  is 
only  a  step  to  his  own  view  of  the  reason  or  the  intellect  as 
simply  the  form  of  the  will  in  the  case  of  man,  a  sort  of 
conscious  way  the  will  has  in  the  case  of  man  of  seeking  to 
realise  its  ends,  while  in  the  case  of  the  lower  animals  it  pur- 
sues its  way  in  comparative  unconsciousness.  Without  doubt 
post-Kantian  philosophy  made  far  too  much  of  reason — tended, 
in  fact,  to  make  reason  almost  the  whole  of  consciousness.  It 
was  natural  therefore  that  a  line  of  thought  like  Schopenhauer's, 
which  in  the  end  really  tends  only  to  show  the  play  of  will  as 
well  as  intellect  in  consciousness,  should  seem  somewhat  sub- 
versive of  existent  notions  at  the  outset.  In  spite  of  the 
blunders  and  crudities  of  Schopenhauer's  psychology,  in  spite 
of  his  trying  to  make  broad  distinctions  where  no  broad  dis- 
tinctions can  be  made  (in  separating  reason  from  perception, 
and  both  from  our  power  of  apprehending  what  he  calls  the 
Ideas),  there  is  a  whole  world  of  significance  in  his  icono- 
clastic treatment  of  reason  and  the  concept,  and  in  his  exalta- 
tion of  both  perception  and  intuition  over  mere  reason  and  the 
mere  conceptions  of  the  reflective  intellect.  When  a  philo- 
sopher says  that  he  knows  the  world  whole  in  reason,  he  is 
right  if  he  remembers  that  the  function  of  reason  is  to  system- 
atise all  the  perceptions  and  the  intuitions  which  the  human 
mind  has  or  tends  ^  to  have  about  reality,     Schopenhauer  is 

^  Tend^  to  have,  because  the  perceptions  and  intuitions  of  art  and  religion 
represent,  in  the  first  instance,  merely  a  tendency  on  the  part  of  man  to  surmount 
the  limits  of  his  life. 


134  Schopenhauer's  system. 

quite  right  in  laying  emphasis  upon  the  fact  that  reason,  while 
of  course  impressing  its  own  form  on  what  it  receives,  can 
give  only  what  it  has  received.  He  himself  pointed  out  to 
philosophers  much  that  was  really  included  in  reason,  which 
they  had  left  out  of  account — viz.,  instinctive  reason,  habit 
and  impulse,  and  the  like.^  They  had  assigned  altogether  too 
much  power  and  importance  to  the  merely  reflective  reason. 
He  of  course  was  wrong  in  concluding  that  because  reason 
could  not  know  the  transcendent  aspects  of  reality,  such 
aspects  of  reality  could  be  studied  only  in  a  realm  of  fact  as 
different  from  the  sphere  of  reason  as  could  well  be  supposed 
(the  mystical  plane  in  which  we  move  or  seem  to  move  when 
we  read  what  he  says  about  art  and  religion).  He  ought 
simply  to  have  given  up  the  search  for  the  transcendent,  and 
to  have  developed  the  idea  that  lay  in  his  own  view  of  reason, 
as  lighting  up  the  world  for  the  will  or  for  the  practical 
purposes  of  our  existence.  Eeason  can  systematise  thought 
only  from  the  standpoint  of  the  will,  from  the  standpoint — in 
the  phraseology  of  Aristotle — of  the  highest  good  for  man  as 
a  being  who  is  acting  and  developing  himself  continually. 

Again  and  again  in  Schopenhauer  we  are  made  to  feel  that 
our  so-called  knowledge  of  reality  is  not  a  direct  experience 
of  reality.  The  idealist's  "  idea  of  sense,"  the  "  effect  in  us  " 
that  a  thing  causes,  colour  or  sound,  e.g.^  all  this  does  not 
seem  to  be  reality.  We  have  suggested  that  it  was  wrong 
ever  to  imagine  the  "  sense  ideas  "  of  Locke  or  Berkeley  to  be 
realities ;  they  are  abstractions  or  fictions.  But  then,  too,  if 
(with  Schopenhauer)  the  conception  be  taken  as  the  type  of 
knowledge,  of  knowledge  which  is  articulate  and  definite,  it 
is  true  that  in  this  case  our  knowledge  of  reality  is  indirect. 
Schopenhauer  never  departs  from  the  idea  that  by  knowledge 

*  By  saying  that  impulse  and  habit  are  included  in  the  sphere  of  reason,  we 
mean  only  that  the  sphere  of  reason  includes  the  latent  and  (to  us)  unconscious 
reason  which  is  manifested  in  instinct  and  impulse  and  natural  tendencies. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.      135 

we  mean  conceptual  knowledge.  When  he  teaches  that  in- 
tuition and  perception  and  feeling  and  volition  are  far  more 
real  than  mere  knowing, — constituting,  in  fact,  a  direct  contact 
with  reality, — it  is  to  be  remembered  that  he  is  offering  a 
substitute  for  a  conceptual  knowledge  of  the  basis  of  reality, 
of  which  h3  has  for  certain  (erroneous  ?)  reasons  despaired. 
Just  because  he  conceived  of  intuitive  knowledge  as  opposed 
to  conceptual  knowledge — opposed,  that  is,  to  the  only  kind 
of  knowledge  that  in  his  eyes  is  real  knowledge — he  is  often 
rather  vague  in  his  references  to  intuitive  knowledge.  This 
is  why,  in  describing  artistic  and  religious  intuitions,  he  strikes 
one  as  unable  to  say  anything  positive  about  them.  They  are 
not  rational  or  ordinary  discursive  knowledge  at  all,  and  that 
is  enough.  We  shall  see  this  later.  The  literal  outcome  of 
his  teaching  is  that,  on  the  one  hand,  all  knowledge  is  indirect 
simply  as  knowledge  (this  is  why  he  seems  to  turn  from 
idealism  the  moment  he  seems  to  accept  it),  and  indirect 
too  for  other  reasons  (because  the  things  of  sense  are  "  ideas," 
and  then  again  because  conceptions  are  only  a  reflex  of 
perceptions) ;  and  that,  on  the  other  hand,  direct  experi- 
ence of  reality  is  given  us  only  in  volition  and  action,  in 
being  and  living,  and  not  in  thinking.  This  is  the  central 
trend  of  his  teaching,  and  just  for  the  very  reason  that  such 
a  contention  seems  to  be  a  mere  reflex  of  the  attitude  of  the 
healthy  man  to  all  philosophy,  beautifully  expressed  in 
Goethe's  lines, —     .. 

"  Qrau,  theuer  Freund,  ist  alle  Theorie 
Und  griin  des  Lebens  goldner  Baum," — 

just  because  with  this  idea  we  seem  to  be  passing  out  of 
philosophy,  to  be  giving  it  up,  as  it  were,  is  it  of  such 
consummate  and  critical  interest.  No  philosophy  seems  so 
supremely  near  and  yet  so  dangerously  far  from  the  central 
shrine  of  rational  wisdom  as  Schopenhauer's.     It  is  certainly 


186  Schopenhauer's  system. 

an  illusion  to  think  that  knowledge,  or  the  fact  of  knowledge, 
makes  a  real  acquaintance  with  things  impossible.  Still 
Schopenhauer  sliows  us,  better  than  any  other  philosopher, 
how  it  is  an  illusion  to  think  that  there  is  in  the  mind 
any  such  thing  as  mere  knowledge.  If  any  one  ever  seriously 
thouglit  that  the  "  idea,"  whether  in  the  form  of  the  sense- 
impression  or  the  intuition  or  the  concept,  is  the  first  thing  in 
consciousness,  he  was  wrong,  and  he  is  undeceived  by  Scho- 
penhauer. Of  course,  if  by  consciousness  we  mean  simply 
an  intellectual  awareness  of  things,  then  certainly  the  very 
notion  of  consciousness  is  just  an  idea  and  nothing  else,  and 
the  idea  is  then  obviously  the  first  thing  in  consciousness. 
But  by  our  consciousness  cannot  be  meant  a  mere  intellectual 
awareness  of  things ;  it  is  far  too  dynamical  a  thing  for 
that.  Consciousness  is  always  the  consciousness  of  some 
activity  or  other,  and  even  the  concept  represents  an  active 
effort  of  the  mind  to  bring  several  things  into  its  focus  by  the 
perception  of  some  one  element  in  them  that  is  common  to 
them  all.  Every  one  professes  to  admit  this,  of  course,  but 
not  perhaps  for  the  reasons  that  Schopenhauer  will  point  out. 
There  is  much  truth  and  much  error  in  his  view  that  by 
knowledge  must  be  meant  conceptual  knowledge.  But 
whether  true  or  false,  it  is  a  view  to  which  Schopenhauer 
adhered ;  and  it  is  because  he  adhered  to  it  that  he  turned 
away  from  knowledge  and  sought  another  approach  to  things 
— strange  and  contradictory  though  it  sounds  to  seek  to  know 
things  by  some  other  process  than  knowledge. 

Thus,  in  short,  if  we  ask  the  question :  Is  our  knowledge  of 
things  direct  or  indirect,  and  where,  if  anywhere,  have  we 
an  immediate  experience  of  reality  ?  Schopenhauer's  answer 
is  that  our  knowledge  of  ordinary  things  is  indirect  or  mediate 
(for  the  reasons  pointed  out  first  by  Berkeley  and  afterwards 
by  Kant),  while  our  knowledge  of  the  Ideas  is  immediate, 
direct,  and  underived,  demanding  only  the  disinterested  view 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       137 

of  an  object  apart  from  its  relation  to  the  will.  In  addition 
to  our  knowledge  of  the  Ideas — which  is  at  best  a  mystical 
kind  of  thing  in  Schopenhauer — the  knowledge  we  have  of 
ourselves  in  volition  and  action  is  also  in  a  sense  immediate 
and  direct,  according  to  Schopenhauer.  "  Although  all  objects 
are  appearances,  there  is  still  a  difference  between  ultimate 
and  immediate  objectifi cation,  immediate  and  secondary.  The 
former  is  what  the  Ideas  have,  the  latter  particular  things.  The 
particular  thing  that  appears  under  some  form  of  the  Principle 
of  Sufficient  Eeason  is  only  an  indirect  objectification  of  the 
thing  in  itself  (which  is  the  will),  between  which  and  it 
the  Idea  stands  as  the  only  direct  objectivity  of  the  will,  be- 
cause it  has  assumed  none  of  the  special  forms  of  knowledge 
as  such,  except  that  of  the  idea  in  general — i.e.,  the  form  of 
being  an  object  for  the  subject."  ^  Another  way  of  stating 
this  same  truth  is  to  say  that  the  things  of  sense  are  not 
absolute  things  at  all,  and  that  if  we  wish  to  come  into  direct 
contact  with  reality  we  must  betake  ourselves  to  the  Ideas  or 
the  self.  Transcendental  idealism  suggested  that  both  things 
and  the  lower  animals  fall  short  of  being  complete  and  rounded 
existences;  their  unity  and  their  reality  fall,  in  fact,  outside 
of  themselves ;  they  are  only  the  lower  grades  of  the  objecti- 
fication of  the  will  to  live.  It  is  a  hard  lesson  to  learn  that 
the  things  which  we  think  to  be  the  most  real,  stocks  and 
stones  and  rocks  and  animals,  are  not  real  in  an  ultimate 
sense  at  all ;  but  Schopenhauer  insists — with  all  the  idealists, 
of  course — that  we  must  learn  it.  Still  we  must  keep  here 
as  far  as  possible  to  the  subjective  way  of  looking  at  the 
matter.  We  do  not  say  outright  that  things  are  not  absohite 
existences,  but  only  that  ordinary  knowledge  seems  to  be 
essentially  phenomenal  and  unsatisfactory ;  the  reality  of  the 
things  we  know  lies,  as  it  were,  ouiside  of  themselves :  the 
very  form  and  order  that  we  give  to  things,  the  very  definite- 

^  Die  Welt,  &c.,  i.  206,  passim. 


138  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ness  in  time  and  place,  the  very  causality  and  reciprocity  we 
attribute  to  them,  are  the  invention  of  our  intellect.  Schopen- 
hauer teaches  all  this,  and  in  doing  so  he  thinks  he  is  acting 
up  to  the  principles  of  Kant. 

III.  We  are  now  in  a  position  to  appreciate  a  somewhat 
precise  and  technical  presentation  of  Schopenhauer's  opinions 
oni  knowledge  and  the  chief  elements  in  knowledge.  The 
main  object -matter  of  knowledge  is  the  ordinary  things  of 
sense-perception.  Just  because  things,  however,  are  objects  of 
knowledge,  their  reality  is  questionable.  They  are  "  ideas " 
of  "  sense  "  to  begin  with,  and  the  whole  category-mechanism 
of  the  intellect  is  employed  to  "  work  them  up  "  into  "  things." 
The  "  self,"  on  the  contrary,  as  the  highest  object  in  experi- 
ence, is  the  least  known  of  all  objects,  being  only  felt  or 
realised  in  action ;  and  between  things  and  the  self,  according 
to  Schopenhauer,  there  may  be  said  to  stand  the  Ideas  which 
are  a  sort  of  "  pure  and  cloudless  "  knowledge,  where  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  "  known  object "  and  the  "  knowing  self " 
for  the  time  vanishes.  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge, 
then,  reduces  itself  to  the  proposition  that  we  must  learn  to 
think  of  different  kinds  of  reality.  As  in  Plato  there  are  the 
things  of  sense,  and  the  Ideas  of  which  these  things  are  a  sort 
of  copy,  and  also  the  fictitious  things  that  the  artist  makes, 
copies,  as  it  were,  of  the  things  of  sense ;  so  it  is  in  Schopen- 
hauer with  a  slight  difference,  the  chief  point  of  the  difference 
being  that  to  Plato  artistic  reality  is  still  only  a  copy  of 
ordinary  reality,  or  ordinary  reality  itself,  worked-up  into  an 
artificial  product,  while  to  Schopenhauer  it  is  the  direct  ex- 
pression of  the  Ideas.  There  are,  according  to  Schopenhauer, 
first,  ordinary  things ;  these  are  ideas  or  phenomena  —  an 
imperfect  reality  made  out  of  mere .  sense  impressions :  then 
there  are  the  forms  or  the  categories  of  the  understanding, 
such  as  cause,  and  substance,  and  the  like :  and  then,  thirdly. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       139 

there  are  the  Ideas,  the  various  grades  of  reality,  sucli  as  the 
chemical  atom,  the  physical  particle,  the  seed  of  the  plant, 
the  structural  element  in  living  beings,  and  the  different  kinds 
of  animals  (lower  and  higher),  the  various  races  of  man  and 
the  individual  characters  of  individual  men.  These  third 
things,  the  various  Ideas  or  "  species  "  or  "  types  "  of  existence, 
are  the  only  real  things  to  Schopenhauer ;  they  are  the  per- 
manent forms  of  the  will  to  live.  The  highest  of  ordinary 
objects  is  the  self,  or  the  human  body,  a  kind  of  union  of 
the  knowing  and  the  willing  subject,  the  most  stupendous 
"  mystery  "  in  the  universe,  seeing  that  it  is  a  kind  of  real 
focus  of  the  will  to  live  and  of  the  Idea  of  man.^  The  will 
has  "  struck  a  light  for  itself  "  in  the  brain  or  the  conscious- 
ness of  man,  and  man  sums  up  in  himself,  as  it  were,  the 
various  grades  of  existence,  having  in  himself  a  consciousness 
partly  explicit  and  partly  implicit  of  the  whole  will  to  live, 
of  the  whole  rerum  natura? 

(a)  There  is  much  perplexing  detail  about  these  distinctions 
of  Schopenhauer's,  but  without  dwelling  upon  them  further 
we  may  proceed  to  a  formal  statement  of  the  most  important 
and  the  most  difficult  position  that  he  formulates  about  know- 
ledge. This  is,  that  the  more  "  real "  knowledge  is,  the  less 
of  "  form  "  is  there  in  it ;  and  vice  versa,  that  the  "  more  of 
form  "  there  is  in  knowledge  the  "  less  of  reality  "  is  there  in 

^  This  simply  means  that  the  human  personality  is  a  combination  of  the  know- 
ing and  the  willing  self.  The  combination  is  "mysterious,"  because  even  the 
psychologist  (who  is  supposed  to  be  accustomed  to  introspection)  experiences  a 
sense  of  mystery  in  trying  to  grasp  the  fact  that  the  self  which  thinks  upon  itself 
and  the  self  which  acts  are  one  and  tho  same.  It  is  very  mysterious  to  Schopen- 
hauer, because  volition  and  '•eflection  seem  to  him  contradictory  to  each  other. 
Volition  seems  to  imply  that  the  man  is  going  out  of  himself  in  action,  and  reflec- 
tion that  he  seeks  to  return  back  upon  himself.  No  human  being,  in  other 
words,  ever  perfectly  understands  himself,  or  is  ever  master  of  himself.  Misera 
conditio  nostra. 

^  Schopenhauer  says  that  each  individual  man  is  the  assertion  of  the  whole 
will  to  live,  and  that  a  thoroughly  selfish  man  wills  for  the  time  as  if  he  were  the 
whole  world.  (Individuality,  it  will  be  remembered,  is  to  Schopenhauer  only  an 
appearance.     He  consequently  professes  to  find  the  one  will  everywhere.) 


140  Schopenhauer's  system. 

it.  This  dilemmatic  way  of  putting  tlie  matter  represents 
perhaps  the  most  extreme  form  of  scepticism  that  has  ever 
been  invented  in  regard  to  knowledge :  it  seems  to  make 
knowledge  virtually  destroy  itself.  At  the  lower  limit  of 
consciousness  (maaa  or  organic  sensation  say — bodily  feeling 
— or  mere  confused  sensation),  knowledge  is  real,  as  it  were 
(must  be  real — we  must  know  something),  but  there  is  so 
little  "  form  "  about  it  that  it  can  hardly  be  described ;  at  the 
upper  limit  of  consciousness,  on  the  contrary  (the  rational 
concept  or  idea),  knowledge  has  "  form,"  and  is  therefore  capable 
of  expression,  but  it  is  at  the  same  time  so  indirect,  and  so 
far  removed  from  reality,  that  it  is  bound  to  become  illusory. 
If  we  want  to  know  things,  it  appears,  we  must  qualify  them 
with  formal  or  mental  attributes ;  but  if  we  go  on  qualifying 
them  too  far,  formalising  and  conceptualising  them,  that  is, 
we  will  end  by  destroying  their  reality.  Schopenhauer  means 
that  when  we  know  phenomenal  things,  we  employ  all  the 
mental  equipment  we  possess  in  the  shape  of  categories  and 
principles  of  the  understanding,  such  as  cause,  substance,  time, 
space,  antecedent  and  consequent,  etc.,  and  yet  we  know  only 
phenomena  after  all,  only  what  the  understanding  has  itself 
constructed ;  whereas  when  we  know  the  most  real  thing  in 
the  world,  the  self,  we  throw  off  our  mental  furniture  entirely, 
throw  it  overboard  as  it  were,  and  lo !  we  know  reality  for 
once.  This  is  the  illusionism  on  which  Schopenhauer's  whole 
philosophy  rests,  the  central  metaphysical  thought  in  his  system. 
We  see  in  it  his  whole  tendency  to  exalt  the  immediate  know- 
ledge that  we  have  of  ourselves  in  being  and  in  willing, 
and  to  despise  the  indirect  knowledge  which,  according  to  the 
principles  of  idealism,  we  have  of  all  other  things — for,  as  we 
have  already  seen,  he  accepts  the  teaching  of  idealism  that 
"  things  "  are  "  ideas."  Idealism  is  wrong  in  this,  no  doubt, 
but  it  has  created  the  impression  that  things  are  ideas. 
The  middle   zone  of  knowledge,  between  the  things   that 


SCHOPENHAUEIl's   THEORY   OF   KNOWLEDGE.         141 

we    know   and  characterise   with   qualities   and   distinctions, 
and  the  self  which  we  do  not  know  (because  knowing  means 
splitting  up  and  distinguishing)  but  only  realise,  is  constituted, 
according  to  our  author,  by  the  Platonic  Ideas  or  the  Ideas  of 
art,  where  the  distinction  between  the  self  and  the  not-self 
"  vanishes."     In  the  contemplation  of  an  artistic  object,  or  a 
Platonic  Idea  (one  of  the  eternal  forms  ^  of  the  will),  there  is 
such  a  perfect  sense  of  harmony  between  the  Idea  which  the 
artistic  product  is  said  to  realise  and  the  artistic  object  itself, 
that  we  seem  to  enter  into  the  inner  reality  and  potency  of 
things.     An  artistic  object  seems  to  be  such  a  perfect  creation 
that  it  might  almost  be  said  to   be  self -existent,  to  be  an 
absolute  something  which  sets  forth  its  own  Idea  as  one  of 
the  direct  or  immediate  assertions  of  the  world-will.     Scho- 
penhauer maintains  that  in  the  contemplation  of  the  Platonic 
Idea  or  object  of  art,  the  mind  is  as  much  passive  as  active ; 
pure  contemplation  and  pure  perception  are  merged  together, 
he  says.     All  the  categories  or  principles  of  knowledge  taken 
together  would  be   needed   to   explain   a   perfectly  beautiful 
object,  and  yet  taken  all  together  they  would  still  be  found 
utterly  inadequate  to  such  an  object,  which  somehow  speaks 
best  for  itself.     An  artistic  object  is  not  an  "  object "  at  all, 
as  it  were — not  an  ordinary  thing — but  an  eternal  thing  or 
an  absolute  Idea ;  we  read  our  whole  self  into  it ;  it  seems  to 
allow  perfect   being   and  perfect   life   to   emanate   from   and 
through  itself.     We  are  "at  rest"  in  the   contemplation  of 
beauty ;  we  are 

"  laid  asleep 

In  body,  and  become  a  living  soul : 

While  with  an  eye  made  quiet  by  the  power 

Of  harmony,  and  the  deep  power  of  joy, 

We  see  into  the  life  of  things." 

Artistic  knowledge,  Schopenhauer  thinks,  is  the  most  perfect 
phase  of  knowledge,  because  it  is   a  perfect  fusion  of  the 

^  Cf.  mpra,  p.  108. 


142  Schopenhauer's  system. 

subjective  and  the  objective  elements  in  knowledge;  it  rep- 
resents a  neutral  zone,  where  these  subjective  and  objective 
elements  shade  into  each  other,  unite  and  coalesce.  As  we 
retreat  from  this  central  neutral  zone  we  pass,  at  the  one 
extreme  into  the  merely  volitional  sense  we  have  of  the  self, 
and  at  the  other  into  the  realm  of  external  perception,  where 
the  things  of  the  outer  world  fill  our  vision,  and  where  we 
ourselves  are  only  one  object  among  other  objects. 

The  things  of  sense  are  to  Schopenhauer  the  most  unreal 
things  in  the  world.  They  are  so  for  the  reasons  of  idealism, 
that  both  their  matter  and  their  form  are  mental  or  subjective. 
Artistic  objec;ts  are  to  him  more  real  than  ordinary  objects ; 
an  artistic  reality  is  a  higher  kind  of  reality  than  ordinary 
reality.  The  self  should  he  to  him  the  highest  of  all  realities. 
It  is  so,  if  we  take  firm  hold  of  his  first  principles  and  of 
some  very  emphatic^  things  he  says  about  the  self  as  the 
union  of  the  knowing  and  willing  subject.  That  is,  Schopen- 
hauer effectually  teaches  that  in  the  search  for  reality  we 
are  driven  back  upon  the  self ;  ordinary  things  —  he  early 
made  up  his  mind —  are  no  reality  at  all ;  artistic  objects  are 
more  real  than  ordinary  objects ;  but  the  highest  reality  lies 
within  the  self,  or  is  the  self,  or  is  the  pure  potency  in  the 
self  which  we  call  the  will.  "  How  do  we  know  the  self  ? " 
you  ask  him.  "  You  have  hit  upon,"  says  Schopenhauer,  "  the 
supreme  paradox  in  the  universe,  for  when  we  seek  to  know 
the  self,  we  find  that  the  known  self  is  nothing,  and  that 
it  is  only  the  willing  self  that  is  real."  His  meaning  may 
be  otherwise  expressed  by  saying  that  in  the  search  for  real 
knowledge  we  finally  come  to  a  point  where  knowledge  as 
.such  "passes  away" — ceases  to  be — passes,  namely,  into  volition, 
which  is  the  key-note  of  the  self.  It  is  of  the  very  essence  of 
Schopenhauer's  philosophy  to  affirm  that  "  the  standing  contra- 
diction of  man's  life  is  this,  that  he  is  compelled  to  seek  the 

^  Cf.  supra,  p,  139. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       143 

reality  of  the  universe  ivith  his  brain — i.e.,  in  and  through  the 
use  of  knowledge;  and  that  he  has  yet  to  confess  in  the  end 
that  knowledge  does  not  help  him  to  understand  the  world,  but 
that  something  different  from  knowledge  is  needed  to  do  this 
— namely,  will."  In  other  words,  just  where  we  do  have  a 
critical  and  crucial  interest  in  knowledge,  where  we  would 
"give  everything"  to  know  (namely,  in  the  case  of  the  self, 
to  which  point  we  are,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  driven  in  our  quest 
for  reality),  we  find  that  knowing  does  not  help  us,  but  that 
we  must  cease  our  endeavour  to  know,  and  must  rest  content 
with  being,  and  yet  we  find  too  that  in  so  being  we  also  under- 
stand. The  man  of  the  world  or  the  realist  will  doubtless 
rejoice  in  this ;  he  will  probably  confess  that  he  neither 
understands  nor  cares  for  the  dialectic  by  which  the  result 
has  been  reached,  but  that  he  rejoices  to  be  told,  what  he 
always  thought  to  be  true,  that  the  meaning  of  the  universe 
is  apprehended  not  by  means  of  the  concept,  not  by  means  of 
"rational  knowledge,"  that  ghastly  spectre  of  the  real  world, 
but  by  a  kind  of  sense,  a  nisics  or  effort,  an  effort  simply  at 
being  and  evolving.  In  truth,  of  course,  knowledge  is  only 
that  part  of  the  sense  of  life  which  has  become  definite  and 
articulate,  and  it  is  this  that  Schopenhauer  proclaims  out 
of  the  archives  of  philosophy,  with  dozens  of  elaborate  onto- 
logical  schemes  stacked  in  lonely  splendour  above  and  around 
him.  All  philosophy,  he  makes  us  feel,  which  does  not  try 
to  express  the  real  life  of  things,  is  of  interest  only  from  the 
standpoint  of  moral  pathology. 

There  are  several  ways  in  which  Schopenhauer's  dilemma 
can  be  expressed  and  is  expressed  by  himself,  and  they  are 
all  more  or  less  important.  His  idea  is  hard  to  understand 
without  the  system  behind  it,  because  when  one  hears  of  there 
being  more  reality  in  certain  things  than  in  other  things,  one 
perhaps,  again,  naturally  thinks  of  external  things  —  rocks, 
stones,  and  trees — as  the  most  real.     But  this  is  because  we 


144  Schopenhauer's  system. 

are  sunk  in  what  Schopenhauer  calls  "  degenerate  European 
realism,"  to  which  any  intelligent  Buddhist  feels  himself 
superior.  It  is  these  very  things  of  sense  that  are  most 
unreal  or  ideal  or  phenomenal,  for  reasons  indicated  more  than 
once.  Schopenhauer's  reasons  for  so  regarding  them  are,  as 
we  know,  highly  philosophical,  and  cannot  be  fully  appreciated 
by  the  mind  which  is  untrained  in  philosophy.  But  there  is 
a  difficulty  in  Schopenhauer  for  the  philosophical  mind  also. 
One  who  has  really  been  "spoiled  by  philosophy,"  who  has 
been  led  to  question  the  reality  of  ordinary  things,  is  apt  to 
go  to  the  other  extreme  of  concluding  that  his  only  real 
knowledge  is  of  his  own  consciousness  and  of  his  own  self. 
Such  a  person  may  indeed  never  have  been  perfectly  comfort- 
able in  thinking  of  David  Hume  and  the  empiricists,  who 
tell  him  that  within  the  self  there  are  only  mental  states  and 
changing  psychical  phenomena,  and  not  any  static  or  per- 
manent self ;  but  he  is  now  apt  to  be  completely  upset  by 
Schopenhauer's  contention  that,  strictly,  we  do  not  know  the 
self  at  all  —  not  only  that  knowledge  here,  as  everywhere, 
splits  up  its  object  into  separate  units  and  phenomenalises  it 
and  renders  it  illusory,  but  that  the  only  key  to  the  self  (and 
consequently  to  all  other  reality  on  the  principles  of  Idealism) 
is  will.  Schopenhauer's  feeling  is  that  the  self  is  far  too  real 
to  be  merely  known,  and  that  there  must  be  an  immediate 
apprehension  of  the  self — viz.,  in  will.  If  it  be  suggested 
at  this  point  that  of  course  the  reality  of  the  self  is  given 
in  a  quasi  feeling  or  sense,  the  sense  of  organic  effort,  and 
that,  strictly  speaking,  all  kno%vledge  of  the  self  is  inadequate, 
there  being  depths  retrospectively  and  heights  prospectively 
in  the  self,  which  are  never  fully  known,  Schopenhauer  might 
reply  that  this  is  doubtless  a  line  of  thought  along  which  his 
reflections  might  be  studied.  It  might  be  possible,  too,  to 
carry  Schopenhauer's  idea  about  an  immediate  knowledge  of 
the  self  further  than  he  himself  thought  of  doing.     We  might 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       145 

fall  back,  for  example,  on  the  general  psychological  position 
that  our  test  of  reality  is  the  possibility  of  a  thing  affecting 
our  will,  and  we  might  then  say  that  anything  which  affects 
our  will,  which  really  determines  our  experience,  is  for  all 
practical  purposes  "  real."  In  this  way  the  lower  animals, 
and  trees  and  rocks  and  stones,  would  all  be  "  real "  to  the 
extent  to  which  they  affect  our  experience.  Thus,  through 
our  will,  we  are  in  contact  with  reality  from  the  beginning  of 
our  lives  to  the  end  of  them.  It  might,  indeed,  be  said  that 
our  practical  knowledge  of  things  is  always  real  and  imme- 
diate ;  and  in  this  way  logical  or  exact  expression  would  be 
given  to  Schopenhauer's  feeling  that  there  must  necessarily  be 
immediate  and  real  knowledge  somewhere  in  our  experience. 

(/3)  There  is  an  even  more  strictly  epistemological  although 
perfectly  objective  way,  in  which  Schopenhauer  expresses  his 
theoretical  illusionism.  He  says  that  on  the  lowest  step  of 
the  scale  of  nature  cause  and  effect  are  quite  homogeneous 
and  quite  equivalent,  and  therefore  perfectly  comprehensible. 
In  the  case  of  the  impact,  under  perfect  conditions,  of  one 
billiard-ball  upon  anotlier,  the  one  ball  receives  just  as  much 
movement  as  the  other  h  ses.  That  is,  cause  and  effect  do  not 
differ  as  to  quality.  But  "  things  change  as  soon  as  we  begin 
to  ascend  in  the  scale  of  phenomena.  Heat,  for  example, 
considered  as  cause,  and  expansion,  liquefaction,  volatilisation, 
or  crystallisation,  as  effects,  are  not  homogeneous,  and  so  their 
causal  connection  is  not  intelligible.  The  comprehensibility  of 
causality  has  diminished :  what  a  lower  degree  of  heat  caused 
to  liquefy,  a  higher  degree  makes  evaporate :  that  which  crys- 
tallises with  less  heat,  melts  when  the  heat  is  augmented. 
Warmth  softens  wax  and  hardens  clay ;  light  whitens  wax 
and  blackens  chloride  of  silver.  And,  to  go  still  further,  when 
two  salts  are  seen  to  decompose  each  other  mutually  and  to 
form  two  new  ones,  elective  affinity  presents  itself  to  us  as  an 
impenetrable   mystery,  and   the   properties   of    the  two   new 

K 


146  Schopenhauer's  system. 

bodies  are  not  a  combination  of  the  properties  of  their  separate 
elements.  Nevertheless  we  are  still  able  to  follow  the  process 
and  to  imitate  the  elements  out  of  which  the  new  bodies  are 
formed ;  we  can  even  separate  what  has  been  united  and  re- 
store the  original  quantities.  Thus  noticeable  heterogeneousness 
and  incommensurability  between  cause  and  effect  have  here  made 
their  appearance  :  causality  has  become  more  mysterious."  ^ 

Going  on  to  speak  of  the  effects  of  electricity  on  the 
voltaic  pile,  where  communication,  distribution,  shock,  igni- 
tion, isolating,  charging,  discharging,  are  all  mysterious  in 
their  operation,  Schopenhauer  continues :  "  Here,  therefore, 
cause  and  effect  are  completely  heterogeneous,  their  con- 
nection is  unintelligible,  and  we  see  bodies  show  great  sus- 
ceptibility to  causal  influences,  the  nature  of  which  remains 
a  secret  for  us.  Moreover,  in  proportion  as  we  mount 
higher  in  the  scale  the  effect  seems  to  contain  more,  the 
cause  less.  When  we  reach  organic  nature,  therefore,  in 
which  the  phenomenon  of  life  presents  itself,  this'  is  the 
case  in  a  far  higher  degree  still."  "  Think,"  he  says,  "  of 
a  world  of  infusoria,  arising  out  of  watered  hay,  or  the 
acorn  giving  birth  to  the  oak  ! "  ^  or  of  any  of  the  pheno- 
mena connected  with  the  origin  of  life ! 

Finally,  when  we  come  to  the  sphere  of  beings  which 
have  knowledge  there  is  no  longer  any  sort  of  resemblance  or 
commemMir ability  between  the  action  performed  and  the  ob- 
ject which  as  representation  evokes  it.  Animals,  seeing  that 
they  are  restricted  to  perccptibk  representations,  still  need 
the  presence  of  the  object  acting  aa  a  motive.  Their  action 
is  then  immediate  and  infallible  ("  if  we  leave  training — i.e., 
habits  enforced  by  fear — out  of  the  question  ").  "  For  animals 
are  imable  to  carry  about  with  them  conceptions  that  might 
render  them  independent  of  present  impressions,  enable  them 
to  reflect,  and  qualify  them  for  deliberate  action.     Man  can 

1  The  Will  in  Nature ;  Bohu's  Eng.  transl.,  p.  313.  »  Ibid.,  p.  316. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       147 

do  this.  Therefore,  when  at  last  we  come  to  rational  beings, 
the  motive  is  even  no  longer  a  iirescnt,  perceptible,  actually 
existing,  real  thing,  but  a  mere  conception,  having  its  present 
existence  only  in  the  brain  of  the  person  who  acts,  but  which 
is  extracted  from  many  multifarious  perceptions,  from  the 
experience  of  former  years,  or  has  been  handed  down  in 
words."  ^  Here,  Schopenhauer  maintains,  just  where  the 
problem  of  causation  is  becoming  most  difficult — that  is,  in 
dealing  with  the  connection  between  motives  and  actions — 
a  "  sudden  light  "  arises,  an  "  unexpected  light " — "  the  chance 
circumstance  that  we,  the  judges,  happen  to  be  the  very 
objects  that  are  to  be  judged." "  "  Just  at  this  point  the 
observer  receives  from  his  own  inner  self  the  direct  information 
that  the  agent  in  his  actions  is  the  will — that  very  will  which 
he  knows  better  and  more  intimately  than  anything  that  ex- 
ternal perception  can  ever  supply."  ^ 

In  the  foregoing  we  have  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of 
causality,  which  is,  that  in  our  study  of  causation,  of  the 
question  of  the  cause  of  any  event  or  phenomenon,  we  are, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  driven  up  through  the  many  stages  of 
natural  causation  to  the  causation  that  is  in  the  self,  action  in 
conformity  with  motives.  This  means  that  anywhere  below 
or  short  of  human  action  we  aro  always  compelled,  practically 
and  theoretically  compelled,  to  ask  for  the  "  cause  of  the  cause," 
and  that  in  human  action  alone  is  it  impossible  and  superfluous 
to  ask  for  the  "  cause  of  the  cause,"  because  a  man's  motives 
are  himself,  are  his  vvill,  because  his  action  is  the  manifestation 
of  a  causal  energy  working  from  within  outwards,  to  be  ex- 
plained only  by  itself,  to  be  referred  only  to  itself,  the  will. 
In  man  we  see,  as  it  were,  the  "  inside "  of  the  will ;  we 
understand  causation  for  the  first  time,  because  we  see  it  from 
the  inside.     But — and  this  is  our  point — the  same  dilemma 

1  The  Will  in  Nature  ;  Bohn's  Eng.  trans].,  p.  316. 

2  Ibid.,  p.  317.  3  Ibid. 


148  Schopenhauer's  system. 

recurs  here  that  we  encountered  before  when  we  were  seeking 
simply  for  the  reality  of  "  things."  We  found  that  we  were 
driven  to  seek  reality  in  the  self,  but  not  merely  a  known 
reality,  rather  a  felt  reality — a  reality  that  we  willed.  And 
so  it  is  here.  In  seeking  to  know  causation,  we  have  to  con- 
fess that  the  result  to  which  we  have  been  driven  is  that  we 
can  only  know  it  by  being  it, — by  being  causal  (as  we  are 
in  willing) — that  knowledge  (reflective,  indirect  knowledge) 
somehow  passes  away,  and  that  willing  or  being  takes  its  place. 
We  understand  causation  because  we  give  up  seeking  to  under- 
stand it  by  means  of  reflection,  and  because  we  ourselves 
become  causation,  find  ourselves  to  be  will,  which  "must  be 
that  which  is  everywhere,"  nay,  "  is  everywhere."  On  looking 
back  from  our  newly  acquired  standpoint  (the  will),  we  really 
see  that  all  causation  is  simply  the  will.  This  is  the  true 
Schopcnhmier.  In  the  deepest  search  for  knowledge  we  arc  eom- 
pcllcd,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  to  give  up  the  attempt  to  know ;  we 
find  something  better  than  knowledge.  We  realise — if  we 
reflect  for  a  moment — that  the  deepest  things  in  the  world 
are  not  known  but  lived  and  felt,  and  are  inexplicable.  Why 
should  not  philosophy  admit  this  ?  There  is  no  explanation 
of  will,  Schopenhauer  says.  "  Velle  non  discitur."  He  would 
agree  with  Edwards  that  we  cannot  "  will  to  will."  This  i» 
such  a  great  result  for  the  purposes  of  philosophical  theory 
and  philosophical  ontology,  that  its  import  can  hardly  be 
grasped  at  once.  One  thing  may  be  said,  however.  In  will 
we  seem  to  have  a  real  principle  by  which  to  explain  things, 
a  reality  we  know  immediately  and  surely.  In  explaining 
all  causality  and  all  real  existence  by  relation  to  volition,  to 
evolved  and  evolving  purpose,  we  explain  it  by  relation  to  a 
realitg  which  is  directly  known,  felt,  and  realised;  whereas 
in  explaining  the  world  by  reference  to  the  "  idea,"  we  are 
explaining  it  by  reference  to  an  ideality — to  a  fiction  (the 
conception,  namely,  of  exhaustive  knoidedge,  which  is  always 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       149 

an  ideal  and  never  a  reality) ;  and  to  a  sccondaiy  thing,  seeing 
that  knowledge  is   (ex  vi   termini)   never  reality  itself,  but 
only  our  consciousness  of  a  reality  that  is  beyond  ourselves. 
Our  power  of  thought,  from  which  Fichte  and  Schelling 
and  Hegel  all  started  as  an  absolute   principle,  is  only  the 
possibility  of  our  being  able  to  view  any  object  or  element  in 
the  cosmos  as  so  far  relative  to  human  purpose  and  human 
volition.      It  is  will  wliich  is  the  real  thing  in  the  world,  and 
can  therefore  be  made  a  principle  which  explains  and  bears 
the  weight  of  all  reality.     On  the  principles  of  Schopenhauer's 
theory  of  knowledge,  we  must  give  up  the  merely  causal  way 
of  explaining  things  (there  is  always  a  "  next "  cause  to  any 
given  cause,  and  so  causality  can  never  be  a  final  explanation 
of  reality),  and  rather  look  upon  things  as  manifestations  of 
organic  purpose,  which  we  knovj  on  the  inside,  in  ourselves,  in 
our  will.    Anything  that  has  no  relation  to  the  will,  to  human 
purpose,  that  does  not  affect  it  in  some  way  (a  pseudo-entity, 
for  example,  like  "  mere  matter  "  or  a  mere  Epicurean  god  in 
th  e  interstellar  spaces),  is  for  us  absolutely  nothing.    To  be  sure, 
we  are  here  developing  the  positive  significance  of  our  author 
somewhat  beyond  the  letter  of  his  system.     But  Schopenhauer 
had  himself  a  broad  intuitive  perception  of  the  power  of  his 
principle,  will  (as  different  from  the  mere  idea),  and  held  to 
the  end  of  his  life  that  the  thinking  world  would  come  to 
accept  his   jarinciple  of  will   as    the    true   first   principle   of 
philosophy.      Of  course  there  is  the  Idea,  too,  as  has  been 
suggested ;  but  that  is  something  which  exists  in  relation  to 
the  will,  and  simply  expresses  the  form  or  forms  under  which 
it  energises.     Generally  speaking,  the  will  represents  the  con- 
tent of  experience — life  and  energy — and  the  Idea  represents 
its   form,  the   articulate   expression   of  life,  or   the   different 
modes  in  which  life  is  exhibited.     The  Idea,  moreover,  is  often 
unconscious,  as  it  is  in  the  case  of  impulse  and  instinct,  anc 
so   the   Idea  is   never    quite    equal    to    the   fulness    of    life. 


150  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Roughly  speaking,  the  post -Kantian  idealists  reversed  this 
whole  mode  of  conception,  and  said  that  the  Idea  represented 
the  essence  of  experience,  and  that  life  and  movement  and  im- 
pulse and  feeling  were  all  secondary  things,  indifferent  things 
(a^idtpopa,  in  the  language  of  the  Stoics),  belonging  to  what 
they  contemptuously  called  the  Vorstdlung,  the  phenomenal 
appearance  of  things.  This  is  indeed  the  philosopher's  fallacy 
'par  excellence ;  ^  it  has  made  many  a  soul  feed  on  the  husks  of 
form  under  the  insane  idea  that  the  rich  varied  life  of  nature 
and  of  instinct  is  so  much  mere  "  empirical  detail."  As  a 
matter  of  fact,  the  extent  to  which  a  man  understands  life  is 
"  empirical  detail " — something  that  varies  with  the  individ- 
uality ;  no  man  understands  life  fully,  but  all  men  may  boldly 
live  up  to  the  fulness  of  human  purpose  and  possibility,  believ- 
ing in  development  where  they  cannot  see  and  understand. 

"  On  the  lowest  stages  of  nature,  then,  we  see  the  will 
exhibiting  itself  as  a  Mind  tendency,  a  dark  dull  striving,  far 
from  all  immediate  knowableness.  This  is  the  simplest  mode 
of  its  manifestation."  The  highest  assertion  of  the  will  is  in 
the  motives  of  human  beings,  and  the  supreme  motive — as  we 
shall  see  in  the  next  chapter — is  the  will  to  live.  Now  if 
the  lowest  stages  of  the  will's  assertion  of  itself  are  essentially 
removed  from  knowledge — incomprehensible — we  might  ex- 
pect to  find  that  its  highest  stages,  its  assertion  of  itself  in 
man,  would  be  nearer  to  knowledge,  to  consciousness,  and 
therefore  more  intelligible.  But  it  is  not  so.  Schopenhauer 
is  always  afraid,  as  it  were,  of  saying  that  the  self  can  be 
knovm.  Any  attempt  to  knoio  anything  necessarily  falsifies 
or  phe7iomenaliscs  that  thing,  makes  it  merely  the  "  object "  of 
a  subject.  And  so  he  saves  the  reality  of  the  self — the  highest 
assertion  of  the  will — by  saying  that  it  too  cannot  be  known, 

^  It  is  really  more  than  this  ;  it  is  a  kind  of  philosophical  Iwsa  majcstas — a 
rebellion  against  the  truth  that  by  doing  the  will  of  the  universe  do  we  under- 
stand it.  And  yet  one  is  constantly  encountering  assertions  to  the  efiect  that  the 
only  way  of  learning  the  naeaning  of  things  is  to  think,  to  sit  still  and  think: 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       151 

but  only  willed — lived,  felt.      To   understand  will  we  must 
will.    As  we  have  already  called  his  reasons  (those  of  dogmatic 
idealism)  for  distrusting  knowledge  imaginary,  we  object  to  this 
conclusion  about  the  self.     "We  can  act  and  still  know  that  we 
are  acting.     Still  it  is  true  that  we  do  not  know  ourselves 
fully.      The  lower  and  the  higher  aspects  of  our   life   both 
"end  in  my.stery."     But  there  is  always  the  second  trovble  in 
Schopenhauer  that  he  finds  volition  as  well  as  knowledge  to 
be  an   illusory  thing.      He  thought  willing  a  huge  mistake 
(because   it    makes   us   break   away  from   the   eternal    peace 
of  the  Ideas  or  of  blissful  unconsciousness  and  painlessness), 
but  this  absurd  notion  must  simply  be  thrown  out  of  court 
just  now.     He  had,  in  spite  of  his  belief  in  will  and  motion 
and  tendency  as  the  principle  that  governs  all  reality,  the  philo- 
sophical prejudice  that  rest  is  superior  to  motion  and  infinitely 
more  intelligible  (in  the  sense  that  in  rest  consciousness  seems 
to  be  allowed  to  turn  back  upon  itself,  while  in  motion  it  is 
always  carried  outside  of  itself).     Apart,  however,  from  both 
these   difficulties   about  what  knowledge  and  willing  are  in 
themselves  (a  very  absurd  thing  to  contemplate !),  there  is  pro- 
found truth  in  Schopenhauer's  feeling  that   tc   undtrstand  the 
will  (and  this  can  only  mean  to  understand  life)  we  must 
resolve  to  will  and  to  live.     But  we  must  never  "lose  our 
heads  "  in  willing,  we  must  always  will  as  human  beings,  re- 
taining, potentially  at  least,  a  consciousness  of  what  we   are 
doing,  and  this  even  when  we  "  let  ourselves  go  "  in  action. 
Schopenhauer  forgets  this  somewhat.     We  can  see  from  the 
various  forms  into  which  he  casts  his  dilemma  that  he  had  a 
much  better  understanding  of  what  willing  is  than  of  what 
Tcnowing  is.     He   always   felt  that   knowing   falsified   things, 
which  must  be  wrong,  because  knowledge  reports  reality,  and 
must  be  trusted  and  not  distrusted.     It  is  necessary  to  state 
still  another  form  of  his  difficulty. 

(7)  "The  more  necessity  any  piece  of  knowledge  carries  with  it 


152  Schopenhauer's  system. 

.  .  .  the  more  there  is  in  it  of  that  which  cannot  be  otherwise 
thought  or  presented  in  perception — as,  for  example,  space 
relations — the  clearer  and  more  sufficing  then  it  is,  the  less 
pure  objective  content  it  has,  or  the  less  reality,  properly  so- 
called,  is  given  in  it.  And  conversely,  the  more  there  is  in  it 
which  must  be  conceived  as  mere  chance,  and  the  more  it  im- 
presses us  as  given  merely  empirically,  the  more  proper  objec- 
tivity and  true  reality  is  there  in  such  knowledge,  and  at  the 
same  time  the  more  that  is  inexplicable — that  is,  that  cannot 
be  deduced  from  anything  else."  ^  Schopenhauer  thus  practi- 
cally agrees  with  Hegel  in  disparaging  the  idea  that  we  add  to 
the  reality  of  any  piece  of  knowledge  by  introducing  the  con- 
ception of  its  necessity.  We  really  weaken  it  by  so  doing, 
because  the  conception  of  necessity  belongs  to  demonstration 
and  not  to  fact.  When  we  try  to  prove  a  thing  necessary,  we 
try  to  show  its  connection  with  something  else,  supposedly 
more  real  or  fundamental  than  itself.  This  has  a  direct  bear- 
ing on  Schopenhauer's  philosophy.  He  is  inclined  to  maintain 
that  the  highest  reading  of  experience  is  not  to  be  found  in 
demonstration  or  in  reasoning,  but  in  observation  of  actual 
fact.  The  will  is  always  something  we  can  see,  as  it  were, 
and  so  are  the  realities  of  art  and  ethics  and  religion.  It  is 
only  conceptions  or  ideas  which  have  to  be  strung  together  in 
a  necessary  or  logical  order;  reality,  on  the  contrary,  is  its 
cv.ni  justification,  and  only  needs  to  be  allowed  to  speak  for 
itself.  Philosophy  has  first  to  adopt  a  receptive  attitude  to 
reality  in  order  to  see  what  reality  is,  before  attempting  to 
deduce  all  reality  from  a  single  principle,  as  the  "  Hegelians  " 
always  seem  to  be  trying  to  do.  To  return  to  our  former 
phraseology,  Schopenhauer  teaches  that  the  more  "  conceptual-" 
knowledge  is,  the  less  "  real "  is  it,  and  that  the  more  "  real " 
knowledge  is,  the  less  "  conceptual "  is  it.  The  most  real  form 
'  World  as  Will,  H.  and  K.  transl.,  i.  158.     The  italics  are  miue. 


schopexhader's  theory  of  knowledge.      153 

of  knowledge,  accordingly,  is  immediate  or  so-called  perceptual 
knowledge,  and  this  comes  to  be  Schopenhauer's  practical  per- 
suasion, although  his  logical  presupposition  ^  always  is  that  only 
conceptual  knowledge  is  knowledge  in  the  strict  sense.     His 
whole  philosophy  records  his  oscillations  between  these  two 
points  of  view,  the  point  of  view  of  his  natural  feeling  and  the 
point  of  view  of  his  intellect  as  trained  (imperfectly  trained  ?) 
by  reading  pliilosophy.     Seeing  that  we  have  an  immediate 
knowledge  of  ourselves  as  willing  (wliatever  willing  means, 
and  as  Schopenhauer  does  not  accept  the  idea  of  the  dualism 
of  mind  and  body  he  is  free  from  the  difficulties  of  Maine  de 
Biran,  say,  on  the  matter),  our  knowledge  of   ourselves   as 
willing  is  the  most  real  knowledge  we  have.     The  Scottish 
philosophers  had  the  feeling  that  immediate  knowledge  is  the 
most  real  kind  of  knowledge,  and  to  save  the  reality  of  our 
knowledge  of  the  external  world  they  maintained  that  such 
knowledge  was  immediate.     If  we  can  grasp  the  meaning  that 
lies  in  Schopenhauer's  idea  of  our  having  an  immediate  know- 
ledge of  the  will,  and  if  we  can  then  grasp  (partly  with  the 
help  of  the  Scottish  philosophers  ")  the  idea  that  we  immediately 
know  everything  to  be  real  which  affects  the  will,  we  have 
learned  Schopenhauer's  lesson,  or  at  least  the  lesson  that  may 
be  drawn  from  him.      Schopenhauer,  by  the  way,  like  a  recent 
expositor  of  Eeid,^  has  a  higher  opinion  of  Keid  than  is  com- 
monly held,  and  regards  him  as  having  vindicated,  under  the 
idea  of  the  immediacy  of  perception,  the  fact  that  perception 
is  an  ultimate  thing,  not  to  be  explained  out  of  mere  sensa- 
tion, but  only  as  a  unique   process.      Eeid's  book,  he  says, 
speaking    of   'The   Inquiry,'   is   "very   instructive    and    well 

*  See  chap.  i.  p.  4. 

-  The  Scottish  philosophers  practically  felt  that  there  must  be  an  immediate 
knowledge  of  anything  that  is  real.  Indirect  knowledge  of  a  thing  is  no  suffi- 
cient  guarantee  of  its  reality. 

*  Professor  A.  Seth,  Scottish  Philosophy,  pp.  76,  77,  &c. 


154  Schopenhauer's  system. 

worth  reading — ten  times  more  so  than  all  the  philosophy 
together  that  lias  been  written  since  Kant." ' 

It  is  obvious  at  once  that  the  more  real  knowledge  is,  the 
less  /orwi  has  it  about  it,  because  our  most  real  knowledge  is 
perccpliial  knowledge,  and  perception  only  tells  us  the  what 
and  not  the  hoio  of  things.  It  is  obvious,  too,  that  the  more 
ideal  ox  formal  knowledge  is,  the  less  "reality"  is  there  about 
it,  because  ideal  knowledge  is  conceptual  knowledge,  notional 
knowledge,  knowledge  in  thought,  indirect  knowledge.  The 
most  real  knowledge,  as  Schopenhauer  teaches,  is  the  know- 
ledge of  the  self ;  and  that  knowledge,  we  may  add,  is  not 
mere  knowledge,  but  something  more — will,  concrete  experi- 
ence. The  most  ideal  knowledge  is,  again,  the  knowledge  of 
the  things  of  sense  and  of  science,  because  sense  phenomena 
are  partly  subjective  (in  the  sense  of  the  Idealists),  and 
because  science  makes  us  regard  the  reality  of  all  things  as 
consisting  in  laivs — mere  statements  of  isolated  sequences,  which 
of  course  are  abstract  things. 

(S)  Lastly,  a  cosmic  or  objective  way  Schopenhauer  has  of 
stating  his  dilemma  is  also  worthy  of  attention.  "  Knowledge 
becomes  clearer,  purer,  and  more  objective,  the  more  the 
intellect  develops  itself,  and  becomes  perfect  in  the  ascending 
scale  of  animal  beings,  and  the  more  knowledge  separates 
itself  from  willing."  A  nervous  system  that  is  most  com- 
pletely separated  from  the  muscular  system,  and  becomes 
specialised,  as  in  the  case  of  man,  into  a  sort  of  centre  of  its 
own,  in  the  greater  and  the  lesser  brain,  is  the  best  guarantee, 
according  to  Schopenhauer,  of  purely  objective  and  theoretical 
knowledge,  or  knowledge  "  on  its  own  account."  He  holds 
that  the  more  the  cerebral  lobes  get  freed  from  the  other 
bodily  organs,  the  greater  is  the  intelligence  possessed  by  the 
organ  in  question.^     Willing,  according  to  him,  is  "  foreign  to 

1  Werke,  ii.  24,  25  ;  H.  and  K.,  ii.  186. 

"^  Man's  brain,  as  it  were,  is  on  the  top  of  his  body,  as  far  away  from  the  gi'ound 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       155 

insight,"  and  prevents  it ;  and  insight  or  knowledge  is  "  foreign" 
to  willing,  and  tends  to  prevent  it.  This  means  that  when  a 
person  wills  he  strives  to  go  outside  of  himself,  and  conse- 
quently cannot  have  "  insight "  into  anything  (for  insight 
would  involve  his  being  at  rest) — it  means  that  the  quiet 
and  the  "  inwardness  "  of  knowing  and  of  insight  is  foreign 
to  the  unrest  and  the  "  outgoingness "  of  volition. 

It  is  a  puzzle  throughout  Schopenhauer  how  a  man  can  act 
and  yet  be  perfectly  self-conscious,  or  how  he  can  be  perfectly 
self-conscious  and  yet  act.  It  is  the  destiny  of  man  to  act 
with  knowledge,  not  with  an  acute  and  painful  self-conscious- 
ness, but  still  with  intelligence.  But  Schopenhauer  could  not 
grasp  this,  owing  to  his  idealistic  suspicions  about  "  knowledge  " 
and  his  weariness  and  hatred  of  the  idolatry  of  knowledge  by 
the  "  Hegelians."  He  was  afraid  of  endangering  the  reality  of 
the  most  real  thing  in  the  world  (the  willing  self)  by  making 
it  a  matter  of  knowledge.  And  yet  he  knew  very  well  that 
the  superiority  of  man  over  the  brutes  consists  in  the  fact  that 
his  brain  is  at  the  top  of  his  body,  elevated  above  his  stomach 
and  his  feet  and  his  bodily  organs.  In  all  this  we  see  the 
contradictory  tendencies  that  are  at  work  in  his  mind — the 
tendency  oa  the  one  hand  to  exalt  intellect  and  the  "  clear- 
ness "  and  the  "  comprehensibility "  of  formal  conceptual  know- 
ledge, and  the  tendency  on  the  other  to  throw  knowledge 
altogether  off  his  shoulders  in  despair,  and  to  exchange  it  for 
the  deeper,  the  intuitive  and  the  volitional,  and  the  heart 
knowledge  of  things,  the  immediate  knowledge  we  have  of 
ourselves  as  agents  in  the  business  of  life.  It  is  with  the 
brain  and  the  intellect,  of  course,  that  we  must  philosophise, 
and  yet  these  are  a  poor  thing  at  best,  as  all  those  who  feel 

(aud  grovelling  and  burrowing  in  the  earth)  as  can  well  be,  while  the  brain  of 
many  animals  is  not  clearly  separated  even  from  their  bodies,  and  is  (^uite  close 
to  the  gi'ound.  The  greater  and  the  freer,  as  it  were,  the  c^'-ebral  hemispheres 
are,  the  further  removed  is  any  animal  from  an  immediate  pur,  \uit  of  the  will  or 
of  appetite. 


156  Schopenhauer's  system. 

deeply  and  who  live  deeply  know.  Schopenhauer  felt  this ; 
he  is  always  talking  of  how  soon  the  brain  gets  wearied  out 
and  tired.  He  often  emphasised  and  re-emphasised  his  caveat 
that  "  philosophy  is  not  a  science  out  of  conceptions,  but  only 
a  science  in  conceptions," — an  attempt,  that  is,  to  state  the 
world  in  the  terms  of  a  few  simple  elements  like  the  Will  and 
the  Idea, 

Fichte  and  Schelling  and  Hegel  were  doubtless  guilty  of 
beginning  in  philosophy  with  conceptions  which  it  required  a 
"  very  high  effort  of  thought "  to  grasp :  the  "Fgo  positing 
itself,"  the  "  I  as  a  principle  of  philosophy,"  "  pure  being " 
which  was  the  same  as  "  pure  nothing,"  and  so  on.  Descartes 
even  began  philosophy  with  an  abstraction — Cogito  instead  of 
Ego  sum  cogitans,  as  has  been  said.  Kant,  too,  suffered  from 
his  tendency  to  assimilate  tho  categories  to  conceptions,  as  we 
have  seen.  In  face  of  all  nis,  Schopenhauer  thought  tliat 
his  will,  while  in  a  sense  a  conception,  was  yet  a  real  con- 
ception— a  conception  that  was  also  a  perception — a  phase 
of  reality  that  one  could  actually  see  and  be  immediately 
conscious  of  in  himself ;  whereas  the  conceptions  of  most  other 
philosophers  —  such  as  "  substance,"  "  monads,"  "  absolute 
reason,"  "  idea,"  etc. — were  for  him  the  "  merest  abstrada  of 
thought."  Philosophy,  as  he  said,  has  been,  "  since  the  time  of 
Socrates,  a  systematic  misuse  of  general  concept  ons  " — a  kind 
of  Bcgriffilichtung,  as  it  were,  a  deification  of  the  concept.  He 
shows  several  times  how  philosophy  has  gone  on  explaining 
things  by  the  most  abstract  sort  of  concepts,  by  concepts  so 
abstract  that  little  positive  significance  could  seemingly  be 
attached  to  them,  and  how  the  Hegelian  philosophy  which 
uses  such  "  utter  abstractions  "  as  "  being  "  and  "  non-being  " 
and  "  becoming "  as  its  bases,  is  tlius  "  the  poorest  and 
thinnest  and  most  impossible  of  all  philosophies."  "VVe  shall 
have  to  consider  whether  Schopenhauer,  with  all  his  severe 
abuse  of   the   concept,  has   really  himself   given   us  a  true 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       157 

account  of  the  utility  of  the  concept.^  We  have  suggested 
that  it  is  not  very  easy  to  find  this  in  him,  except  by  way  of 
suggestion.  Indeed  the  attempt  to  find  it  takes  us  beyond 
his  mere  theory  of  knowledge.  It  is  partly  entered  upon  in 
the  next  and  in  succeeding  chapters. 

IV.  It  is  easy  to  see  how  Schopenhauer's  difficulties  about 
knowledge  reduce  themselves  to  the  fact  of  his  inability  to  dis- 
tinguish from  and  relate  to  each  other  properly  the  two  ideas 
of  consciousness  and  self-consciousness.  "  The  more  the  one 
side  of  consciousness  comes  to  the  fore,  the  more  does  the 
other  retreat.  And  so  our  consciousness  of  other  things — 
i.e.,  our  attuitivc  knowledge  (anschauende  Erkcnntniss)  be- 
comes more  complete,  more  objective,  the  less  we  are  at 
the  same  time  conscious  of  ourselves.  The  more  we  are 
conscious  of  the  object,  the  less  we  are  conscious  of  the 
subject;  the  more,  however,  our  consciousness  of  the  self 
increases,  the  weaker  and  more  imperfect  is  our  concep- 
tion of  the  external  world."  It  is  perfectly  evident  from 
this  description  of  consciousness  that  there  are  upper  and 
lower  limits  of  consciousness,  and  that  consciousness  tends 
to  pass  at  its  lower  limits  into  a  merely  passive  physical 
sense  uf  reality,  a  mere  attuitive  (to  use  a  favourite  term 
of  Professor  Laurie's  ^)  feeling  of  being  in  general,  and  at  its 
upper  limits  into  a  reflective  sense  more  of  one's  own  person- 
ality than  of  external  things.  Consciousness,  as  we  ordin- 
arily know  it,  never  goes  to  the  one  or  the  other  of  these 
extremes ;  it  merely  temls  to  do  so.  It  is  because  Schopen- 
hauer unconsciously  wanted  a  knowledge  of  the  "  mere  self " 
out  of  its  relation  to  the  outer  world,  and  of  the  "  outer 
world  "  out  of  relation  to  the  self, — the  very  thing  that  his 
splendid  idea  of  connecting  both  the  woiid  and  the  self  in 

1  Cf.  pp.  194,210,  477. 

■  See  'Metaphysica  Nova  et  Vetusta,  2d  ed.,  pp.  17,  57,  d  passim. 


158  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  one  element  of  organic  volition  really  ought  to  have  kept 
him  from, — that  he  tended  to  separate  reflective  conscious- 
ness from  "  attuent "  or  perceptual  consciousness.  He  goes 
on  to  say,  just  after  the  words  last  quoted,  that  "  it  is  only 
possible  to  attain  to  a  pure  volitionless  knowledge — that  is, 
to  an  objective  appreciation  of  the  world — when  the  con- 
sciousness of  other  things  is  so  emphasised  in  potency  that 
the  consciousness  of  one's  self  vanishes."  One  is  inclined 
to  ask  what  an  appreciation  of  the  world  could  mean  when 
there  is  no  self !  Of  course  the  outcome  of  his  philosophy 
is  that  you  cannot  separate  the  self  and  the  world,  self- 
consciousness  and  consciousness ;  he  himself  brought  them 
together  in  will ;  and  our  question  is,  whether  this  idea 
or  this  fact  of  will  does  not  enable  us  to  connect  physical 
and  psychological  reality  better  than  the  traditional  notion 
of  self  as  intellect  or  idea.  Schopenhauer  himself  wanted 
to  get  to  "  objective  knowledge,"  because  the  "  idea  "  and  the 
"  concept "  both  seemed  "  subjective  "  to  him.  As  a  matter 
of  fact,  they  are  not  subjective  in  the  sense  that  in  them 
we  do  not  know  reality ;  hoth  in  the  idea  and  in  the  concept 
we  do  Jcnoiv  reality,  and  it  is  Schopenhauer  who  has  best  tanght 
us  to  see  this}  The  idea  and  the  concept  are  both  connected 
with  will,  and  in  willing  we  have  an  immediate  sense  of 
reality.  Eeality  is  for  us  what  we  find  it  to  be  in  our 
volition,  and  what  we  make  it  to  be  in  our  volition.  In  a 
sense  reality  is  something  which  we  evolve  or  will.  There 
is  something  of  the  self  in  external  things  (things  are  what 
is  related  to  our  will) ;  and  there  is  something  of  external 
things  in  the  self  (the  self  must  have  a  given  amount  of  matter 
or  material  reality  which  it  can  idealise  or  perfect  by  its 
volition).     The  meeting -point  of  the  self  and  reality  is  in 

^  Chap.  iv.  will  suggest  that  the  main  utilitj'  of  the  concept  is  to  give  us 
motives  to  action.  It  unfolds  the  relation  t'^at  things  sustain  to  our  will — i.e., 
the  reality  of  things. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       159 

the  will/ — we   may  say  in  evolution  or  in  process,  hut  that 
is  the  same  thing. 

Schopenhauer  was  wrong  in  separating  consciousness  and 
self- consciousness,  perception  and  reflection.  Knowledge 
does  not  pJicnomcnalise  things  and  make  them  illusory,  but 
if  we  really  take  a  firm  hold  of  it,  it  tells  us  what  things 
are ;  we  learn  through  it  of  the  various  grades  of  reality  or 
causality  (in  the  language  of  Schopenhauer),  such  as  physical 
causation,  chemical  combination  or  dissolution,  organic  effort, 
motived  action,  and  so  on.  Self-consciousness,  too,  cannot  be 
separated  from  consciousness,  our  knowledge  of  ourselves  from 
our  knowledge  of  things.  We  are  in  a  real  world,  and  we  are 
only  real  in  that  world,  and  not  out  of  it.  We  are  organised 
will,  in  short,  and  the  world  is  organised  will  too.  It  is  futile 
to  separate  the  knowledge  of  the  self  from  the  knowledge 
of  other  things.  I  express  myself  in  my  actions  and  pur- 
poses, in  my  body,  and  in  its  actions,  and  in  its  surroundings. 
Schopenhauer's  dilemma  about  real  knowledge  and  formal 
knowledge,  about  necessary  knowledge  and  actual  knowledge, 
about  conceptual  knowledge  and  perceptual  knowledge,  has  no 
basis  in  fact.  All  knowledge  is  partly  formal  and  partly  real — 
that  is,  it  has  formal  or  ideal  (mental)  aspects,  and  it  has  also 
real  or  material  aspects.  In  the  same  way  knowledge  is  partly 
conceptual  and  partly  perceptual,  partly  necessary  and  partly 
contingent,  partly  consciousness  and  partly  self-consciousness, 
partly  objective  and  partly  subjective.  The  chief  service  of 
the  whole  dilemma  is  to  bring  out  the  fact  that  reality  is 
indeed  greater  than  our  knowledge  of  it,  or  that  we  are  only 
conscious  of  a  small  portion  of  reality,  or  that  reality  has  to 
be  lived  and  willed,  and  not  merely  to  be  knotvn,  and  that  all 

'  This  may  be  more  evident  later — after  the  chapter  on  Art.  It  is  there  sug- 
gested that  artistic  reality  may  be  said  to  sum  up  all  reality,  and  yet  that  artistic 
reality  is  a  reality  which  we  to  a  certain  extent  ourselves  evolve  or  create.  And 
80  in  ethics.  It  lies  in  the  power  of  the  human  will  to  help  to  create  the  ethical 
kingdom  that  is  in  a  sense  the  outcome  of  history. 


160       •  Schopenhauer's  SYSTEM.  • 

knowledge  and  all  self-consciousness,  and  all  conceptions  and 
all  ideas,  refer  to  the  one  cosmic  process  called  "  will " — i.e., 
cosmic  life  or  evolving  reality.  It  is  what  we  do  and  attain  to 
that  constitutes  our  reality,  and  not  merely  what  we  think. 
Eeality,  in  other  words,  does  not  consist  in  mere  ideas. 
There  is  much  palpable  truth,  no  doubt,  in  the  idea  that 
our  knowledge  of  ordinary  things  is  "  clear  and  comprehen- 
sible," at  least  for  all  practical  purposes,  so  long  as  we  steer 
clear  of  the  sophistries  of  subjective  idealism.  Our  knowledge 
of  the  self,  again,  seems  to  be  incapable  of  being  expressed  in 
definite  terms,  or  at  least  to  evade  us  when  we  are  busily 
engaged  in  the  work  of  life.  We  feci  the  self,  but  we  do 
not  really  knoiv  it.  "  Our  consciousness  becomes  brighter 
and  clearer  the  more  it  extends  itself  outwards  towards 
perception,  where  its  greatest  clearness  is  to  be  found  ;  it 
becomes,  on  the  other  hand,  darker  as  we  go  inwards,  and 
ends,  if  one  follows  it  right  up  into  its  inmost  recesses, 
in  a  darkness  where  all  knowledge  passes  away."  It  is 
true  that  the  recesses  of  our  being  become  dark  to  mere 
intellectual  philosophy,  to  mere  introspective  psychology. 
The  reality  of  the  self  consists  in  an  effort — an  effort  which  is 
best  studied  in  an  ethical  regard.  We  shall  see  this  later. 
It  may  be  questioned,  in  fact,  if  the  true  explanation  of 
the  personality  of  man  is  to  be  found  at  any  lower  stage 
than  the  philosophy  of  religion,  because  only  in  religion  are 
we  forced  to  study  the  struggle  between  the  natural  (the 
unconscious)  and  the  spiritual  (the  conscious  or  ideal)  will 
of  the  individual.  It  has  been  once  or  twice  suggested 
that  religion  constitutes  an  integral  part  of  philosophy  to 
Schopenhauer. 

Knowledge  has  no  right  to  question  the  reality  of  any  object 
which  appears  before  consciousness  as  an  object.  There  may 
be  different  grades  of  reality — Schopenhauer's  idea  of  grades 
of  reality  or  of  the  will  admits  of  great  extension :  a  stone  is 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       161 

one  thing  and  a  sound  another,  and  autumn  tints  another,  and 
a  man's  body  another ;  but  these  things  are  all  real,  all  pheno- 
mena of  the  real  world.  If  we  surrender  one  phase  of  reality 
we  do  violence  to  all  reality ;  for,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  high- 
est objects,  like  the  human  body,  include  in  them  all  the  other 
objects  or  phases  of  reality.  We  must  therefore  retain  all  of 
them  intact  and  whole.  We  may  "  grade  "  reality  as  much  as 
we  will,  but  all  the  grades  of  reality  are  reality.  Even  if  a  thing 
is  only  relatively  real,  in  the  sense  that  it  is  not  an  absolute 
entity  (like  the  fully  conscious  person,  for  example),  it  is  still 
"  real."  There  is  the  difficulty,  of  course,  of  connecting  these 
different  planes  of  reality  with  each  other.  We  have  seen 
this  in  thinking  of  transcendental  idealism  or  transcendental 
realism.  From  first  to  last  we  have  seen  that  our  knowledge 
of  reality  reduces  itself  to  the  sense  we  have  of  reality  as 
affecting  our  action  and  our  volition.  Our  consciousness  of 
reality  is  our  knowledge  of  things  as  affecting  or  affected  by 
our  volition.  Our  self-consciousness  is  our  knowledge  of  our- 
selves as  affected  by  and  possibly  affecting  all  other  reality. 
Our  self-consciousness  seems  indeed  to  be  vague,  because  it  is 
reducible,  in  idea,  simply  to  our  consciousness  of  infinitely  being 
and  willing.  Our  knowledge  of  ourselves  is,  in  the  phraseology 
of  modern  psychology,  merely  an  accompanying  presentation, 
a  Beffleitvorstellung  of  what  we  are  made  and  are  making  our- 
selves to  be.  The  "  I  "  is  dark,  as  Schopenhauer  suggests  and 
has  the  courage  to  say ;  our  knowledge  of  ourselves  is  not 
equal  to  all  that  we  are  already  or  may  yet  become.  Eeality, 
according  to  Schopenhauer,  consists  in  being,  in  evolving,  and 
in  evolving  infinitely.  The  self  has  the  task  before  it  of  re- 
lating itself  in  action  to  all  reality  and  to  the  highest  reality. 

V.  Having  already  reached  the  limits  of  the  mere  theory  of 
knowledge,  we  may  bring  this  chapter  to  a  close  with  a  simple 
reference  to  one  or  two  important  theoretical  advantages  of 

L 


162  Schopenhauer's  system. 

regarding  the  world  as  will,  and  of  placing  the  reality  of  the 
self  in  will.  Let  us  take,  for  example,  that  very  technical  part 
of  Logic  which  is  called  the  theory  of  predication.  A  philosophy 
of  life  must  make  some  broad  assertion  about  reality  as  a 
whole.  The  outcome,  indeed,  of  wisdom  is  the  ability  to  judge 
— to  pronounce  a  judgment  about  things  and  events  which 
shall  be,  moreover,  a  real  judgment  about  them.  A  philosophy 
which  sins  against  the  logical  conditions  of  the  judgment  can 
be  no  philosophy.  But  how  can  our  mere  judgment  ever  be 
true  about  reality  ?  It  may  be  emphatically  stated  that  if 
knowledge  consists  in  the  mere  concept,  and  if  the  judgment 
is  only  the  comparison  of  one  concept  with  another  concept,  of 
one  mental  entity  with  another,  then  a  judgment  about  the 
world  as  a  whole  by  the  mere  individual  is  impossible  and 
absurd.  No  mere  juxtaposition  of  two  ideas  in  our  heads  can 
ever  adequately  represent  the  world  as  a  whole.  There  is  one 
great  theoretical  reason  why  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  will 
always  preserve  a  hold  on  the  human  mind,  and  it  is  this  : 
no  philosophy  thought  out  of  the  brain  of  a  thinker  ever  as- 
serted so  strongly  as  does  his  the  utter  inadequacy  of  all  mere 
conceptions  or  ideas  about  life  before  the  great  fact  of  life 
itself.  Indeed  one  very  soon  learns  from  Schopenhauer  that 
our  conceptions  about  life  are  simply  nothing  or  very  little, 
save  as  coming  from  a  total  experience  of  life.  Now  no  man 
knows  life  a  priori,  just  as  no  man  knows  himself  a  priori. 
Schopenhauer  always  insists  that  it  takes  some  time,  some 
experience  of  our  own  conduct — in  which  we  generally  think 
we  are  free,  although  we  afterwards  know  we  followed  deep 
instinct  which  we  could  not  control — to  enable  us  to  know 
what  we  are  ourselves.  We  are  will,  and  we  only  know  will 
a  'posteriori,  not  a  priori.  How,  to  resume,  can  our  know- 
ledge be  real  unless  it  is  in  contact  with  reality — i.e.,  issues 
from  a  direct  experience  of  reality,  and  so  is  no  longer  a 
matter  of  abstract  conceptions  ?     Our  knowledge  indeed  seems 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       163 

to  issue  from  our  volitional  experience  of  reality,  but  is  that 
experience  of  the  veiy  essence  of  reality  ?  It  is  doubtless  a 
large  thing  to  claim  the  whole  of  reality  as  will.  But  we 
have  seen  several  logical  reasons  for  regarding  the  world  as 
consisting  simply  of  will  or  purpose,  or  of  our  will  and  things 
which  affect  our  will.  There  is  a  great  deal  of  satisfaction, 
too,  in  being  able  to  connect  the  scientific  analysis  of  the 
world  into  a  sum  of  forces  with  Schopenhauer's  epistemo- 
logical  analysis  of  reality  into  that  which  affects  our  will. 
Schopenhauer,  in  fact,  has  converted  ontology — the  question, 
"  What  is  such  and  such  a  thing  really  and  ultimately  ? " — 
into  teleology — the  question,  "  What  does  such  and  such  a  thing 
ultimately  do  ? " 

A  judgment  upon  life,  if  Schopenhauer's  account  of  the 
matter  be  in  the  main  true,  simply  resolves  itself  into  the 
question  of  interpreting  our  experience  of  life.  It  is  true 
that  Schopenhauer  professed  to  do  this  himself,  and  ended  by 
saying  that,  as  matter  of  fact,  life  was  for  the  most  part 
painful  and  bad.  But  we  cannot  accept  this  conclusion,  and 
on  Schopenhauer's  own  principles.  He  has  taught  us  that  all 
conceptions  come  from  perceptions ;  they  are  consequently 
conceptions  of  how  things  affect  our  will.  But  our  will 
carries  us  beyond  the  mere  things  that  affect  us,  carries  us 
infinitely  beyond  them,  in  fact,  onwards  and  ever  onwards, 
towards  further  volition.  The  best  judgment  about  life,  then, 
is  to  be  found  not  merely  in  conceptions,  for  conceptions  only 
tell  us  how  we  have  willed  or  how  we  ought  to  will  in  view 
of  a  certain  end,  but  in  the  fact  that  we  still  will.  Adjec- 
tives both  positive  and  negative  are  inadequate  to  life.  The 
fact  that  we  have  experienced  is  a  proof  that  life  has  attained 
to  some  things.  That  it  has  attained  to  some  things  is  an- 
other way  of  saying  that  it  is  good  as  far  as  it  has  gone,  for 
the  original  meaning  of  the  word  good  is  serviceable  or  valu- 
able in  view  of  some  end.     The  fact  that  we  still  have  experi- 


164  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ence,  and  can  through  our  volition  attain  to  ever  higher  and 
higher  (or  deeper  and  deeper)  experience  of  reality,  shows 
that  life  is  still  good.  And  our  necessary  acceptance  of  the 
principle  of  continuity  warrants  us  in  maintaining  that  life  is 
essentially  good — objectively  good  and  valuable.  Schopen- 
hauer himself  has  to  admit  much  of  this  even  at  the  same 
time  that  he  talks  of  the  illusoriuess  of  many  of  the  expecta- 
tions that  we  form  about  life. 

By  saying,  therefore,  that  the  world  is  will,  or  that  life  is 
will,  Schopenhauer  ha.s  enabled  us  to  understand  the  saying 
that  the  history  of  the  world  is  the  justification  of  the  world, 
— " Die  Weltgescli ichtc  ist  das  Wdtgericht"  He  thought  that 
history  was  "  nothing,"  because  time,  the  category  of  history, 
was  only  "  in  our  heads  "  (pseudo-Kantism  !)  ;  but  the  experi- 
ence of  the  race  is  just  as  real  a  thing  as  the  experience  of 
the  individual,  and  the  experience  of  the  race  is  history,  is 
tantamount  to  the  fact  that  humanity  has  accomplished  some- 
thing— has  willed.  Of  course  we  shall  onlv  later  be  able  to 
think  fully  of  the  content  that  may  be  read  into  the  expres- 
sion the  world  is  tvill.  That  there  is  a  history  of  the  world 
is  a  justification  of  the  world,  because  it  means  that  the  world- 
will  has  attained  to  something.  Schopenhauer  himself  could 
not  see  anything  positive  in  history,  but  that  was  owing  to 
a  radical  defect  in  his  mental  constitution.  He  thought, 
indeed  (for  wrong  reasons),  that  the  will  did  not  attain  to 
anything,  but  this  does  not  militate  against  the  significance 
of  his  general  principle.  IVe  shall  later,  in  the  chapters  on 
art  and  ethics  and  religion,  inquire  why  his  philosophy  of 
volition,  which  is  or  ought  to  be  a  philosophy  of  evolution, 
has  no  outlook.  The  final  process  of  the  world  Schopenhauer 
absurdly  imagines  to  be  downwards  or  backwards,  as  it  is  in 
the  decadence  philosophy  of  Proclus. 

It  ought  in  fairness  to  be  mentioned  that  Schopenhauer's 
own    definition    of   the   judgment    connects  him   more   with 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       165 

fjcholasticism  than  with  modern  theories.  "  Judging,"  he  says, 
"is  simply  comparing  one  concept  with  another."  "The 
meaning  of  the  copula  is  that  the  predicate  inheres  in  the 
subject."  In  fact,  Schopenhauer's  whole  views  on  logic  were 
those  of  scholastic  formalism,  just  as  his  theory  of  the  concept 
was.  His  inability,  therefore,  to  connect  the  judgment  witli 
reality  is  a  characteristic  defect.  A  "  Hegelian  "  might  justly 
pass  the  strongest  censure  on  Schopenhauer  for  a  great  deal  of 
crude  dualism  that  he  takes  into  his  philosophy  without  the 
slightest  "  criticism  " — the  dualism  between  the  concept  and 
the  percept,  for  example.  But  then  Schopenhauer  is  perfectly 
careless  about  his  own  consistency.  We  have  tried  often, 
in  spite  of  Schopenhauer  himself,  to  give  an  extended  in- 
terpretation to  his  general  principle  of  will  as  connecting 
many  things  that  he  kept  apart.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  all 
judgments  reduce  themselves  to  an  assertion  that  the  real 
world  is  such  and  such  or  so  and  so.  But  we  know  the 
"  such  and  such  "  or  the  "  so  and  so "  only  through  our  ex- 
perience, and  we  are  warranted  in  making  a  judgment  about 
the  world  as  a  whole  on  the  strength  of  our  experience, 
just  because  our  experience  is  experience^  is  a  real  thing — 
attainment,  will  (which  is  the  reality  of  all  things).  As  being 
really  will,  our  experience  is  an  expression  of  the  natur.^  '.  f 
reality,  which  is  through  and  through  movement  and  process 
and  development.  Tht  complete  theory  of  the  judgment, 
indeed,  implies  that  reality  is  not  r/ierely  something  that  we 
know  on  the  outside,  but  something  that  we  in  a  seme  are. 
From  the  standpoint  of  knowledge  alone,  of  conceptual  know- 
ledge alone,  it  always  remains  a  problem  whether  or  not  our 
judgments  about  reality  will  turn  out  to  be  valid  and  objective 
and  real.  The  consistent  philosopher,  from,  the  standpoint  of 
knowledge  alone,  is  necessarily  to  a  large  extent  a  sceptic. 
But  he  need  not  be  this  on  a  general  acceptance  of  Schopen- 
hauer's principles.     If  reality  is  will  or  process  in  relation  to 


1G6  Schopenhauer's  system. 

our  experience,  and  if  our  experience  is  will  too,  then  what 
we  experience  is  true  of  reality — is  in  fact  reality. 

In  the  chapters  on  art  and  religion  we  shall  suggest  that 
our  highest  purposes  and  aspirations  actually  constitute  for 
us  the  final  reality  of  the  world.  We  must  certainly  agree 
that  realitj'  cannot  be  anything  other  than  what  we  really 
experience.  Our  experience  is  reality :  we  as  conscious 
persons,  having  conscious  purposes,  are,  in  fact,  the  highest 
reality — or  rather  we  are  capable  of  becoming  the  ultimately 
real  things  in  the  world,  for  we  are  not  yet  as  real  as  we 
may  be.  If  it  be  urged  with  Protagoras  that  a  "  dog-faced 
baboon  "  might  say  the  same  thing  about  reality,  that  reality 
is  that  which  sustains  an  active  relation  to  its  will,  the  mean- 
ing we  have  extracted  from  Schopenhauer  is  not  yet  perfectly 
understood.  Of  course  it  is  true  that  for  the  "  dog-faced 
baboon  "  reality  is  what  it  experiences  it  to  be.  But  man 
has,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  a  higher  place  in  the  economy 
of  nature  than  the  "  dog-faced  baboon."  He  is  more,  because 
he  docs  more  or  experiences  more.  Ileality,  according  to 
Schopenhauer,  consists  in  infinitely  being  and  doing,  and  it 
is  in  infinitely  being  and  doing,  in  infinitely  aspiring  and 
willing,  that  man's  nature  onsists.  History  rightly  inter- 
preted shows  this.  Once  again,  Schopenhauer  himself  does 
not  rise  to  the  height  of  this  thought,  but  he  enables  others 
to  do  so. 

It  may  be  said,  by  way  of  r6sum4,  that  the  most  important 
things  in  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge  are  his  Platon- 
ism  and  his  Kantism  ("  the  divine  Plato  and  the  marvellous 
Kant"),  and  the  use  that  he  makes  of  both,  or  compels  us 
to  make,  on  the  basis  of  his  realistic  principle  of  will.  "We 
see  on  the  one  hand  that  the  transcendental  world  is  simply 
will,  the  reality  of  the  visible  world ;  and  on  the  other  that 
all  conceptions  (and  not  merely  the  highest  conceptions)  have 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.      167 

at  bottom  a  practical  significance.  Schopenhauer  does  not 
make  a  dogmatic  use  of  reason, — does  not  try  to  make  the 
various  concepts  and  entities  of  reason  constitute  the  real 
world.  Philosophy  is  a  science  in  conceptions,  but  not  out 
of  conceptions.  He  does  not  use  reason  to  find  out  the 
essence  of  the  world,  while  he  does  use  it  as  causing  us  to 
think  anything  that  may  prove  to  be  practically  helpful  to 
us.  Eeason,  he  would  say,  simply  systematises  the  matter 
that  is  presented  to  it. 

Of  the  will  Schopenhauer  holds  that  we  have  an  immediate 
experience.  So  far,  therefore,  as  reality  is  will,  it  may  be 
said  that  we  have  an  immediate  knowledge  of  the  nature  of 
reality.  The  outcome  of  his  positive  philosophy  is  that  we 
sum  up  reality  in  our  volitions,  and  bring  reality  to  its 
highest  expression  of  itself  in  our  highest  volitions  or  aspir- 
ations or  efforts.  His  principle  of  will  may  be  used  as  a 
path  along  which  we  may  get  out  of  the  puzzles  of  idealism 
about  reality,  but  of  course  many  of  these  puzzles  are  largely 
unreal.  On  the  principles  of  Schopenhauer  and  on  those  of 
modern  psychology  there  is  no  cognitive  element  of  conscious- 
ness which  is  not  associated  with  a  life-preservative  impulse 
or  a  life-preservative  movement  of  the  body.  All  our  ideas 
are  psychical  efforts  on  our  part  to  conquer  the  "  real "  for 
our  practical  and  moral  purposes.  The  self  is  a  key  to 
leality — not,  however,  the  knowing  self,  but  the  willing  self. 
All  this  is  right,  if  by  the  willing  self  is  meant  all  that  the 
liuman  personality  is  and  is  capable  of  becoming. 

A  highly  interesting  feature  of  Schopenhauer's  theory  of 
knowledge  is  his  pronounced  tendency  to  pcrcei^Uialisc  in- 
tellection, to  assimilate  all  real  knowledge  to  the  type  of 
perception  and  immediate  apprehension.  Philosophy  must 
somehow  come  back  to  the  richness  of  an  immediate  and 
direct  knowledge  of  reality,  and  will  also  have  to  learn  to 
trust   knowledge  in   what  it   says    about   things.       It    indeed 


168  Schopenhauer's  system. 

must  do  so  if  the  meaning  of  things  is  to  be  learned  more 
by  living  than  by  thinking.  We  must  have  a  practical 
(volitional)  acquaintance  with  reality  before  we  can  think 
it.^  We  cannot,  for  example,  understand  goodness  or  beauty 
or  religion  unless  we  try  to  evolve  these  things  in  our  lives 
by  an  exercise  or  an  attitude  of  will.  Eeality  is  for  us 
what  we  make  it  to  be.  Only  because  Schopenhauer  began 
in  philosophy  with  a  half-understood  idealism,  did  the  ideal 
of  knowledge  seem  to  him  to  be  knowledge  that  is  altogether 
independent  of  the  will.  It  is  not  true  that  the  genius  sees 
things  out  of  relation  to  the  will.  Napoleon  read  men's 
natures  all  the  better  because  he  estimated  them  as  instru- 
ments for  his  purposes.  It  is  false  to  say  that  "  any  design 
or  intention  is  always  dangerous  to  insight."  ^  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  the  world  can  be  understood  only  as  one  gigantic  design 
or  organic  attempt.  Schopenhauer  ought  to  have  revised  his 
ideas  about  knowledge  so  as  to  bring  them  into  harmony 
with  his  doctrine  of  will.  His  idea  that  all  concepts  have 
primarily  a  practical  value  is  a  step  in  this  direction,  al- 
though he  does  not  work  it  out  fully.  What  he  teaches 
about  the  relation  of  the  concept  to  the  percept,  while  to 
a  certain  extent  almost  truistic,  is  something  that  philo- 
sophy has  always  to  learn  anew.  Locke  long  ago  told  us  to 
relate  our  conceptions  to  perceptions,  to  reality ;  and  Comte 
and  others  have  told  us  the  same  thing  in  this  present 
century.  Schopenhauer  has  sho^vn  us  how  hard  a  thing  it 
is  to  grasp  the  unity  of  the  knowing  and  the  willing  self. 
He  has  suggested  to  us  that  the  best  way  to  do  this  is  to 
view  the  self  dynamically  and  teleologically,  and  ncc  on- 
tologically.  Many  philosophical  questions,  indeed,  are  best 
answered  by  taking  a  dynamical  or  practical  or  evolution- 

*  "  The  true  kernel  of  all  knowledge  is  that  reflection  which  works  with  the 
help  of  intuitive  representations ;  for  it  goes  back  to  the  fountain-head,  to  the 
basis  of  all  conceptions." — 'The  Fourfold  Root.' 

«  Cf.  pp.  2«,  182,  197,  206. 


Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge.       169 

istic  view  of  reality.  A  great  defect  of  Schopenhauev's  is 
that  he  did  not  fully  grasp  the  truth — which  is  as  old 
as  the  Thecctetus  ^  of  Plato — that  knowledge  consists  in  the 
union  of  conception  and  perception.  It  is  idle  to  write 
at  length,  as  Schopenhauer  does,  about  the  mere  concept 
or  the  mere  percept.  There  are  no  such  things.  A  last 
reflection  is  this.  Schopenhauer  always  held  that  reason 
never  discovered  the  unconditioned,  but  only  the  "  next  co7i- 
dition " ;  not  the  final  cause,  but  only  the  efficient  or 
immediate  cause  of  things.  Wliere,  then,  does  the  ideal  of  a 
k'lowledge  of  the  world  as  a  whole  come  from  ?  From  the 
reason,  despite  Schopenhauer  ?  or  from  the  will  ?  or  from 
uur  total  organic  consciousness  ?  Schopenhauer  also  insisted 
that  philosophy,  as  different  from  science,  sought  for  a  unified 
view  of  things.  The  effort  to  understand  the  world  as  a  whole 
is  perhaps  best  comprehended  when  seen  to  be  bound  up  with 
the  need  we  feel  of  having  our  own  experience  complete  itself. 
This  is  a  desire  of  the  will. 

The  net  outcome  of  this  chapter  is  to  suggest  that  neither 
knowledge  nor  the  attitude  of  mind  towards  things  that  is 
called  idealism,  nor  in  fact  reality  itself,  can  be  properly 
understood,  so  long  as  we  cry  to  keep  to  the  plane  of  the 
mere  intellect.  Fortunately,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  it  is 
impossible  to  separate  our  intellectual  consciousness  of  things 
from  our  total  organic  sense  of  reality,  and  our  total  organic 
effort  to  will  and  to  continue  to  will  and  exist.  As  we  pro- 
ceed with  the  study  of  his  pliilosophy,  the  truth  of  this 
should  become  still  more  apparent.  We  have  found  Schopen- 
hauer virtually  contending  for  a  new  kind  of  idealism  about 
reality,  a  dynamic  idealism  in  which  the  reality  of  all  things 
is  determined  by  the  function  and  purpose  they  discharge 
in  the  cosmic  process.  All  things  seem  capable  of  being 
graded  as  lower  or  higher  assertions  or  manifestations  of  the 

^  'El'  fiiy  Apa  ToTs  iraBtifiaatv  ouk  ivi  iirtarTiinri,  iv  ii  r^  -ntpl  iKtlvuv  auWoyiayi^. 


170  Schopenhauer's  system. 

same  force  or  will  that  makes  itself  most  completely  felt  in 
the  case  of  the  human  personality.  We  found  Schopenhauer 
entangled  in  many  confusions  when  dealing  with  the  ordinary 
or  dogmatic  idealism.  That  was  inevitable,  for  a  literal  ac- 
ceptance of  subjective  idealism  or  of  ordinary  dogmatic  ideal- 
ism is  sure  to  lead  to  iilusionism.  Schopenhauer's  halting  atti- 
tude toward  reality  is  duo  to  his  inability  to  shake  himself 
completely  free  of  intellectual  idealism  (the  philosopher's 
idolon) — an  inability  which  continues  to  the  end  of  his  system. 
We  have  touched  very  lightly  on  the  reasons  Schopenhauer 
imagined  he  had  for  accepting  idealism  at  the  outset  of  his 
philosophising,  and  indicated  the  relations  which  his  system 
as  a  whole,  and  the  different  parts  of  it,  sustain  to  the  prob- 
lems of  philosophy  as  seen  by  the  idealist. 


171 


CHAPTER    lY. 


THE    BONDAGE    OF     MAX. 

"  And  so  the  care  for  the  preservation  of  existence,  under  demands  that 
are  excessively  hard  and  that  make  themselves  felt  an  i\v  from  elay  to  day, 
makes  out,  as  a  rule,  the  whole  of  human  life.  Ou  to  that  care  a  second 
demand  immediately  attaches  itself,  the  care  for  the*  preservation  of  the 
race.  Life  is  threatened  constantly  by  the  most  diverse  kinds  of  dangers 
from  all  sides,  and  to  avert  these  the  most   constant   watchfulness  is 


necessarv 


"  1 


"  Shs  vvv  fiot  (pt\6TriTa  koI  'Ifiepov,  fre  av  Trduras 
Sujuvi^  iOavdrovs  T)5e  6vr]T0vs  avOpwirovs."  - 

"  Das  ist's  ja,  was  den  Menschen  zieret 
Und  dazu  ward  ihm  der  Verstand, 
Dass  er  im  innern  Ilerzen  spliret 
"Was  er  erschaft't  mit  seiner  Hand."  '■^ 

We  may,  as  already  suggested,  coutemplate  Schopeuhaiier's 
whole  philosophy  as  representing  the  difficulties  and  the 
consequences  attendant  on  the  introduction  into  philosophy 
of  the  thought  which  a  leading  exponent  of  Naturalism  is  re- 
]iorted  to  have  expressed  in  the  following  words  :  "  Nowadays 
we  must  abandon  the  study  of  the  metaphysical  man  of  ^Lj 
years  gone  by,  for  an  inquiry  into  the  physiological  creature 
of  our  days.  That  is  my  opinion,  and  it  is  in  defence  of 
this  conviction  that  I  have  worked  for  j'ears."^ 

1  Schop.,  Werke,  ii.  368.  -  Homer,  Iliad,  xiv.  198,  199, 

'  Schiller,  "Daa  Lied  von  der  Glocke." 

*  The  Idler,  July  1893  ;  reported  conversation  of  M.  Zola. 


172  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Man,  according  to  Scliopenliauer,  is  in  bondage  both  in 
his  mental  and  in  his  moral  activity.  It  is  on  the  slavery 
of  man,  as  he  conceives  it,  that  Schopenhauer  rears  what 
has  been  called  his  pessimism ;  it  is  the  slavery  of  man  which 
gives  to  his  ethic  and  his  metaphysic  their  problems.  It  is 
well  known  that  in  post-Kantian  philosophy  man  was  con- 
ceived as  elevated  out  of  the  phenomenal  necessity  of  the 
world,  now  in  virtue  of  his  reason,  which  seemed  to  make 
him  "  the  author "  rather  than  "  the  subject "  of  necessity, 
and  now  in  virtue  of  his  will,  which  seeiued  to  contain  in 
itself  a  principle  of  free  initiative,  not  to  be  explained  out  of 
any  antecedent  thing  whatever.  Perhaps  the  most  distinctive 
aspect  of  Schopenhauer's  teaching  in  this  regard  is  in  con- 
nection with  the  reason  of  man.  He  reminded  philosophers 
that  most  of  their  decisions  about  the  universe  are  inevitably 
inlluenced  by  the  fact  that  the  intellect  of  man  is  not  a 
spontaneous  automatic  thing,  energising  for  its  own  free 
delight,  for  the  delight  of  a  godlike  contemplation  of  all 
things  in  heaven  above  and  in  the  earth  beneath  and  in  the 
water  under  the  earth,  but  a  form  of  activity  that  is  wholly 
subservient  to  the  needs  of  the  will  and  the  multifarious 
wants  of  man's  life.  We  invent  explanations  only  about 
things  which  affect  our  will  in  some  way  or  other,  he  teaches ; 
and  all  our  knowledge  about  things  tells  us  only  about  the 
relations  they  sustain  to  our  will  and  practical  nature. 

As  to  the  will,  he  emphasises  the  teaching  of  Kant, 
that  it  is  impossible  to  prove  its  freedom  inductively,  and 
that  only  in  a  transcendental  sense  can  it  be  regarded  as  free ; 
but  the  significance  of  his  teaching  lies  in  the  fact  that 
he  studied  the  problem  of  the  freedom  of  the  will  from  the 
point  of  view  of  impulse  and  instinct  and  of  cosmic  evolu- 
tion in  general.  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  practically  reduces 
itself  to  an  exposition  and  defence  of  the  thesis  that  we 
cannot  know  the  world  out  of  relation  to  ourselves  and  our 


THE   BONDAGE    OF   MAN.  173 

practical  activity.  This  indeed  may  be  the  true  sense  of 
Kant's  doctrine  that  knowledge  is  limited  to  phenomena,  a 
doctrine  which  has  never  failed  to  impress  common-sense  and 
scientific  and  theological  thought  as  containing  a  large  amount 
of  profound  truth.^  Then,  again,  we  may  see  from  Schopen- 
hauer, although  only  by  way  of  suggestion  at  the  end  of  his 
system,  that,  as  Hegel  said,  "  Freedom  is  the  truth  of  Neces- 
sity,"— that  out  of  the  very  bondage  of  man  comes,  in  a  sense, 
his  "  salvation "  and  his  "  freedom."  Hegel  saw  this  truth 
more  as  a  flash  of  dialectic  insight  and  not  as  Schopenhauer 
causes  us  to  see  it,  after  dragging  us  down  to  the  depths 
of  the  animal  aspects  of  the  human  personality  and  along 
the  common  highway  of  actual  and  conventional  life. 

It  would  be  possible  to  begin  by  showing  how,  according 
to  Schopenhauer,  man  is  in  his  reason  enslaved  to  the  ministry 
of  his  practical  wants,  and  so  to  continue  the  approach  to  the 
system  from  its  theoretical  side.  But  it  will  be  more  apparent 
what  the  Will  is  on  which  Schopenhauer  builds  everything, 
if  we  begin  instead  with  the  moral  or  the  practical  bondage 
of  man,  with  the  bondage  of  the  will  instead  of  the  bond- 
age of  the  reason.  Eeason  is  a  secondary  and  a  special 
form  of  the  activity  of  man,  according  to  Schopenhauer, 
his  primal  and  general  activity  being  will.  In  our  study 
of  Schopenhauer's  metaphysic  we  shall  see  the  difficulties 
which  beset  the  chief  assumption  of  the  Critical  Philosophy, 
that  reason  is  the  first  thing  about  man's  life,  the  point  of 
view  from  which  man's  activity  and  the  life  of  the  world 
are  to  be  explained ;  or  at  least  we  shall  see  by  implica- 
tion the  small  extent  to  which  reason  alone  can  be  said  to 
be  adequate  to  the  systematisation  of  human  life.     We  ought, 

'  Philosophers  of  the  nineteenth  century  would  not  perhaps  have  foisted  so 
much  transcendentalism  on  to  Kant,  if  they  had  considered  somewhat  the  actual 
effect  of  the  study  of  Kant  upon  typical  men.  The  lesson  Goethe  learned  from 
Kant  was  to  restrict  the  mind  to  the  study  of  what  is  manifestly  concrete  and 
practical. 


174  Schopenhauer's  system. 

in  fact,  to  imbibe  from  Schopenhauer  a  healthy  distrust  of 
all  attempts  to  regard  any  one  element  or  any  one  point  of 
view  about  the  world  as  really  and  ultimately  fundamental. 
His  doctrine  of  the  bondage  of  man  seems  to  ignore  the  very 
existence  of  idealistic  and  speculative  philosophy  in  the  same 
stout,  stolid  way  tliat  Positivism  does.  Schopenhauer,  indeed, 
has  many  of  the  leanings  of  the  I'ositivist.  When  one  closes 
one's  Hegel  or  Plato  and  reads  what  he  has  to  say  about  the 
incessant  aimless  toiling  of  the  will,  one  is  reminded  of  the 
effect  the  speech  of  Mephistopheles  produces  on  the  mind  after 
that  of  the  angels  in  the  Prologue  to  "  Faust."  "  With  the 
world  alone  has  philosophy  to  do,  and  it  leaves  the  gods  at 
rest ;  expecting,  however,  in  return,  that  it  will  be  left  at  rest 
by  them."  ^  Writers  like  La  Eochefoucauld,  Chamfort,  Cer- 
vantes, and  Eousseau — Schopenhauer  quotes  most  of  them — 
and  Voltaire  put  the  student  in  the  jjroper  attitude  of  mind 
for  the  study  of  the  positive  aspects  of  Schopenhauer's  system. 
We  may  regret  this  somewhat — may  regret  that  any  writer 
should  be  so  one-sided  as  to  profess  to  study  the  actual  (jjro- 
fana)  to  the  exclusion  of  the  ideal  (sacra) ;  but  we  may  still 
be  willing  to  admit  that  philosophy  should  study  the  actual 
as  well  as  the  ideal  (omnia  sacra  ct  'profana).  If  Schopenhauer 
had  not  the  sobriety  of  insight  of  Aristotle,  for  whom,  as 
Hegel  puts  it,  "  there  are  plants  and  animals  and  men,  and 
besides  this  God,  the  most  excellent  of  all," "  his  generalisation 
Will  may  be  broad  enough  to  include  in  it  the  effort  after 
ideal  reality  as  well  as  the  search  for  material  satisfaction. 

I.  Although  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  essentially  a 
cosmology  (Jiylozoism  almost),  it  is  possible  to  expound  some- 
what sum.marily  his  teaching  about  will,  for  the  reason  that 

'  Quoted  by  Wallace,  '  Life  of  Schopenhauer,'  p.  63. 

-  Quoted  from  '  Journal  of  Speculative  Philosophy ' ;  transl.  of  Hegel's  '  Phil- 
osopliy  of  Aristotle. ' 


THE    BONDAGE   OF    MAN.  175 

he  avails  himself  throughout  his  works  of  several  scientific 
conceptions  and  distinctions  of  recognised  significance.  Will, 
in  the  cosmic  sense,  is  the  sum -total  of  all  physical  and 
crganic  processes,  and  is  identified  with  the  world  as  a 
whole  very  much  by  the  same  line  of  thought  that  makes 
scientific  men  reduce  matter  to  force.^  Will,  in  the  case 
of  man,  however,  if  we  are  to  be  perfectly  fair  to  the  system  of 
Schopenhauer,  can  be  describe^  only  in  a  double  way.  It  may 
mean,  and  it  is  sometimes  practically  taken  by  Schopenhauer 
to  laean,  the  sum -total  of  all  the  organic  and  instinctive 
and  reflex  and  unconscious  actions  performed  by  man — all 
those  actions,  in  short,  from  which  thought  or  conscious  effort, 
in  the  strict  sense,  is  excluded ;  it  may,  on  the  other  hand, 
receive  such  an  extended  signification  as  to  include  even 
thought-processes  and  conscious  processes,  for  Schopenhauer 
could  not  give  his  will  a  truly  universal  significance,  unless 
human  tlj inking  also  were  made  by  him  in  a  sense  a  form 
of  will,  one  of  the  ways  in  which  the  world- will  acts  and 
asserts  itself.  There  is  a  certain  difficulty,  of  course,  in 
correlating  or  uniting  these  two  ways  of  looking  at  will,  and 
this  is  the  difficulty  of  the  system.  Apart  from  this  technical 
difficulty  there  is  the  fundamental  difficulty  of  reconciling  a 
cosmic  philosophy  of  mere  force  or  tendency  with  the  ideal- 
istic analysis  of  experience,  which  shows  that  mental  or 
subjective  elements  enter  into  even  what  we  call  things  or 
"  objects."  We  must  waive  this  second  ^  difficulty,  however, 
just  now,  and  without  any  misgivings ;  for  after  all  a  true 
philosophy,  as  Schopenhauer  teaches,  must  be  able  to  look 
at  the  world  from  all  sides :  the  results,  in  fact,  of  a  really 
final  philosophy  must  admit  of  being  worked  out  in  various 
ways,  and  the  highest  test  of  a  philosophy  is  its  power  of 
working  into  the  facts  from  any  side,  its  capability  of  being 
explanatory  from  whatever  point  of  view  it  may  be  compelled 

'  Cf.  supra,  chapter  on  Idealism.  -  Cf.  chaps,  v.  and  vi. 


176  Schopenhauer's  system. 

to  start.  "  For  this  reason  I  have  never  had  a  care  as  to 
the  mutual  consistency  of  my  doctrines — not  even  when  some 
of  these  appeared  to  me  inconsistent,  as  was  the  case  for  some 
time ;  for  the  agreement  came  afterwards  of  itself  in  propor- 
tion to  the  numerical  completeness  of  the  doctrines ;  con- 
sistency in  my  case  being  nothing  more  than  the  consistency 
of  reality  with  itself,  which,  of  course,  can  never  fail."  ^ 

We  are  conscious  in  ourselves  both  of  instinctive  actions 
and  of  so-called  conscious  actions  or  actions  with  a  motive, 
and  it  is  well  known  that  our  conscious  actions  rest  upon  and 
include  and  are  only  possible  through  the  normal  occurrence 
of  the  instinctive  and  automatic  and  habit-acquired  actions 
which  make  up  what  is  often  called  the  lower  forms  of  our 
activity.  Of  the  more  purely  physiological  actions  of  the 
body  we  are  not  strictly  conscious  at  all,  and  indeed  we 
become  aware  of  their  existence  only  when  we  are  in  a 
state  of  physical  illness  and  find  our  deliberate  or  conscious 
actions  hampered  by  them.  Only  when  our  digestive  organs 
are  out  of  order  do  we  become  consciously  aware  that  there 
are  such  things  in  us  as  digestive  functions,  on  whose  normal 
and  periodic  performances  our  physical  and  mental  tone  is 
very  largely  dependent.  Of  reflex  actions  that  are  partly 
psychical  as  well  as  physical,  like  winking  or  feeling  afraid, 
we  have  at  least  o,  feeling  consciousness,  while  our  highest  and 
most  intense  form  of  consciousness  is  associated  with  what  are 
called  purely  deliberative  or  motived  actions.  Consciousness 
is  simply  the  total  feeling  we  have  of  all  the  organic  and  all 
the  psychical  actions  which  our  personalities  exhibit.  There 
is,  then,  unconscious  and  conscious  volition.  Schopenhauer 
makes  us  ask  very  carefully  what  the  consciousness  is  which 
exists  in  man  over  and  above  mere  automatic  or  habit-en- 
gendered function,  or  more  particularly,  whether  automatic 
function  (or  will  in  the  broad  sense)  exercises  any  controlling 
^  Schop.,  Werke,  v.  142 ;  Eug.  transl,  Beifort  Bax,  Schop.  Essays,  pp.  154,  155. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF    MAN.  177 

inlluence  over  our  consciousness  proper  and  our  power  of 
deliberate  volition ;  and  if  an  influence,  whether  such  an  in- 
fluence as  to  warrant  us  in  regarding  will,  in  the  sense  of 
automatic  organic  process,  to  be  the  first  and  the  supreme 
thing  in  consciousness.  This  is,  we  can  see,  the  vexed  ques- 
tion of  the  freedom  of  the  will  in  a  most  modern  form, 
and  Schopenhauer  recognises  the  importance  of  his  diffi- 
culty. "  Our  question  is  really  one  of  grave  import.  It 
opens  up,  in  fact,  an  investigation  into  the  inmost  nature 
of  man :  we  desire  to  know  whether  he  too,  liky  every- 
thing else  in  the  world,  is  a  being  which  is  determined  once 
and  for  all  by  its  proper  nature,  and  which,  like  all  things 
in  nature,  has  got  its  definite  and  lasting  qualities  which 
cause  it  to  react  in  a  necessary  way  towards  external 
stiinulus — tiie  reactions,  of  course,  maintaining  their  necessary 
character,  and  being,  so  far  as  any  possible  modifications  are 
concerned,  wholly  at  the  mercy  of  external  circumstances ;  or 
whether  man  actually  constitutes  an  exception  to  the  whole 
of  nature."^  We  shall  see  what  light  is  thrown  upon  this 
problem  nt  the  different  stages  of  Schopenhauer's  thought. 
We  shall  likely  agree  that  no  real  solution  is  given  of  it  until 
we  come  to  the  philosophy  of  religion,  and  that  even  the 
religious  solution  is  pnly  practical,  not  theoretical.  Will,  to 
Schopenhauer  as  to  modern  psycho-physics,  is  essentially  a 
form,  however  complex,  of  reaction  to  stimulus,  whether  the 
stimulus  comes  from  the  outer  world  or  from  the  depths  of 
the  organic  self.  "  When  a  man  wills,  he  wills  some  thing : 
his  volition  is  always  directed  to  some  object,  and  can  only  be 
thought  of  in  this  way.  What  does  it  exactly  mean  to  will 
anything  ?  It  means  that  the  act  of  volition,  which,  to  begin 
with,  is  itself  only  matter  of  internal  or  conscious  experience, 
is  called  forth  on  the  occasion  of  something  that  falls  under 
our  consciousness  of  external  things,  and  is  thus  an  object  of 

1  Schop.,  Werke,  Freiheit  des  Willens,  ss.  20,  21, 
M 


178  Schopenhauer's  system. 

knowledge.  This  something,  as  falling  under  our  knowledge, 
is  called  motive,  and  constitutes  at  the  same  time  the  matter  of 
our  volition,  that  on  which  the  will  effects  a  change  or  on  which 
it  reacts.  In  this  reaction  consists  the  whole  nature  of  will."  ^ 
This  is  perfectly  satisfactory,  and  all  the  facts  of  volition 
admit  of  being  studied  under  the  light  of  tliis  idea.  The 
slightest  acquaintance  with  the  literature  of  the  psychology  of 
volition  will  show  that  modern  psychologists  never  think 
of  the  will  in  any  other  way  than  this.  As  has  long  been 
recognised,  and  as  Schopenhauer  always  insists,  there  is  no 
action  without  motives  (however  feebly  a  g.'ven  motive  may 
be  felt),  and  the  whole  question  of  volition  may  be  centred  in 
the  inquiry  whether  the  act  of  will,  as  Schopenhauer  puts  it, 
is  necessarily  called  forth  by  motive.  If  it  be  said  that 
the  real  question  of  freedom  lies  behind  the  relation  of  motive 
to  action — lies,  in  fnct,  in  the  formation  of  motives — this 
does  not  at  all  destroy  the  contention  that  the  question  of 
freedom  can  be  studied  only  by  considering  the  relation  of 
motives  to  actions.  The  question  of  freedom  has  been  raised 
for  so  many  different  reasons,  and  common-sense  is  so  easily 
thrown  into  confusion  on  the  point  by  the  "  slightest  phil- 
osophy," that  it  seems  fair  to  conclude  with  Schopenhauer 
(and  indeed  with  Kant  too)  that  our  immediate  consciousness 
gives  us  little  heli^  in  solving  the  question  of  freedom.  As 
Schopenhauer  puts  it,  it  is  the  head  that  asks  the  question, 
and  the  head  that  must  solve  it  (so  far  as  it  can  be  solved  ?). 
This  is  right ;  the  question  of  freedom  is  one  of  the  two  or 
three  problems  which  justify  for  all  time  the  existence  of 
philosophy :  mere  common-sense  knows  nothing,  or  next  to 
nothing,  about  it.  As  a  very  accomplished  and  philosophical 
statistician  "  remarks  :   "  Whatever  one's  personal  convictions 

1  Sehop.,  Werke,  Freiheit  de3  Willens,  s,  ll. 

*  Mr  Arthur  Macdonald  of  the  Bureau  of  Education,  Washhigton,  U.S.A.,  iu 
'Abnormal  Man'  (Essay  on  Criminology),  p.  38, 


THE    BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  179 

may  be,  questions  of  the  fVeedoin  of  the  will  and  the  like  must 
be  set  aside,  iiot  because  they  are  not  important,  but  simply 
because  enough  is  not  known  regarding  the  exact  conditions 
(psychological  and  physiological)  under  which  we  act  and 
tliink.  If  we  were  obliged  to  withhold  action  in  the  case  of 
any  criminal  for  the  reason  that  we  did  not  know  whether  the 
will  is  free  or  not  (allowing  for  all  misconceptions  as  to 
this  whole  ({uestion),  the  connnunity  would  be  wholly  unpro- 
tected." Professor  Sidgwick,  after  mucli  careful  reilect'on, 
has  decided  that  "  it  is  of  no  practical  importance  for  a  man 
to  decide,  with  a  view  to  the  general  regulation  of  his  con- 
duct, whether  he  is  or  is  not  a  *  free  agent '  (in  the  meta- 
physical sense)."  ^  Schopenhauer  thinks  that  all  the  greatest 
philosophers  and  religious  teachers  have  answered  the  question 
of  freedom  (absolute  or  abstract  freedom)  in  the  negative — 
Augustine  and  Kant,  for  example.  We  need  go  into  no 
process  of  collation  of  opinion  to  prove  or  to  disprove  this. 
Schopenhauer  shows  us  how  man  is  more  necessitated  than  free, 
and  we  must  study  with  him  the  consequences  of  this  conclu- 
sion. Common-sense,  indeed,  tells  us  that  we  are  free  to  act 
as  we  will,  but  common-sense  knows  very  little  about  ivhy  we 
do  will  as  we  will. 

All  our  instinctive  and  automatic  and  habit-engendered 
actions  are  capable  of  explanation  as  reflex  actions,  under 
the  ordinary  assumptions  of  biology  about  heredity,  and 
a(iaptation  to  environment,  and  the  end  of  life  as  more  life 
and  fuller  life.  Schopenhauer  does  not  put  the  matter 
exactly  in  this  way,  but  his  whole  philosophy  rests  on  the 
fact  that  impulse  or  instinct  is  absolutely  irresistible  in 
its  workings,  and  that  the  instincts  and  tendencies  of  man 
constitute  a  total  system  in  which  some  impulses  are  sub- 
ordinated to  and  guided  by  other  impulses,  and  that  the  end 
of  life  is  (much  as  he  deplores  the  fact)  simply  more  life.     It 

1  The  Methods  of  Ethics,  1884,  p.  70. 


180  Schopenhauer's  system. 

is  true  that  if  Schopenhauer  had  seized  in  its  entirety  the 
idea  tliat  the  impulses  and  instincts  and  habits  and  motives 
of  man  constitute  a  natural  system,  in  which  the  higher  in- 
stincts and  motives  on  the  whole  balance  the  actions  of  the 
lower  and  the  relatively  unconscious  instincts  and  tendencies, 
he  would  n)t  have  been  misled  for  one  moment  by  the  idea 
that  there  could  possibly  be  a  lasting  conflict  between  the 
lower  and  higher  impulses,  or  even  between  the  unconscious 
and  the  conscious  acts  of  man.  He  sees,  to  repeat,  that  all 
unconscious  tendency  in  man  is  perfectly  inevitable  and 
irresistible  in  its  action,  and  that  so  far  man  is,  in  virtue  of 
his  organic  or  corporeal  nature,  not  free  but  necessitated. 
The  difficulty  of  his  philosophy  is  that  he  makes  us  think 
that  man's  higher  or  rational  activity  has  as  much  a  purely 
natural  history  as  his  lower  impulsive  activity  has,  and  so 
that  man  throughout  his  whole  personality  is  determined  by 
the  necessity  of  natural  character  and  circumstance. 

Can,  then,  our  conscious  actions  be  explained  as  purely 
reflex  actions  ?  The  answer  is  that  they  can  be.  And  they 
are  explained  in  modei  ■"  psychology  and  Ijiology  as  also  life- 
furthering  actions,  •:  representing  the  organic  effort  of  the 
individual  to  attain  to  that  which  most  directly  furthers  life 
at  the  particular  place  or  time.  Our  free  or  conscious  actions 
are  simply  actions  wherein  we  are,  to  a  greater  or  less  extent, 
aware  of  the  way  in  ivhich  we  seek  to  attain  the  end  at  which 
we  aim ;  but  there  is  a  perfect  natural  history  of  volition  and 
of  the  fact  that  we  will  just  this  object  at  this  time  and 
just  that  object  at  that  time.  We  may  wish  many  things, 
but  we  only  can  and  only  do  ^viU  just  one  p;ecise  thing  at  a 
given  time  and  not  another  thing.  We  have  learned  this 
from  a  study  of  the  two  ideas  of  apperception  and  loill,  inlro- 
duced  into  philosophy,  we  might  almost  say,  or  at  any  rate 
reintroduced  with  new  meaning,  by  Kant  and  Schopenhauer, 
respectively.     Kant   practically   showed   that  nothing  enters 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  181 

into  actual  consciousness  without  being  apperceived,  as  he 
put  it  —  i.e.,  recognised  and  incorporated  into  our  mental 
system  b;  our  total  available  consciousness  ;  and  Schopenhauer 
showed  that  nothing  enters  into  actual  c  jnsciousness  without 
disturhing,  to  a  greater  or  less  extent,  our  total  mental  and 
physical  activity — throwing  it  out  of  adjustment,  as  it  were, 
and  calling  forth  a  reflex  organic  movement  wliich  restores 
the  equilibrium  of  our  total  active  nature,  just  as  the  mental 
apperception  of  Kant  restores  the  equilibrium  of  our  idea- 
tional or  mental  system.  In  other  words,  Schopenhauer  re- 
minds philosophy  that  all  so-called  mental  acts  are  also 
organic  acts,  acts  of  the  will,  phases  of  our  active  nature. 
Even  thought  is  only  one  out  of  maiiy  organic  activities. 
And  modern  psychology  has  learned  Schopenhauer's  lesson 
by  studying  apperception  as  ahvays  accompanied  by  a  physical 
reaction  movement  which  we  know  from  biology  to  be  also 
a  life-preservative  movement.  In  thinking  we  are  all  con- 
scious of  the  sense  of  effort,  located  somewhere  in  the  head, 
to  adapt  our  whole  organic  and  mental  activity  to  the  per- 
ception of  the  object  we  are  studying  in  its  real  connection 
as  opposed  to  its  many  possible  connections.  In  fact,  our 
whole  mental  system  rejects  more  or  less  deliberately  or  con- 
sciously any  conception  or  idea  or  set  of  ideas  which  does  not 
fit  in  with  its  established  order,  which  is,  as  far  as  possible, 
the  order  of  ideas  most  calculated  to  call  forth  the  action 
which  best  furthers  our  organic  development.^  This  is  why 
the  human  mind  rejects,  for  example,  such  schemes  of  philo- 
sophy as  rounded  materialism  or  rounded  idealism. 

The  truth  about  will  as  intelligent  conduct  is  that  it  is  a 
development  of  the  action,  in  unison,  of  the  two  tendencies 
termed  by   the   psychologists   the   apperception -impulse   and 

'  As  is  well  known,  there  is,  in  the  life  of  humanity  and  of  the  individual,  a 
gradual  evolution  of  those  ideas  or  beliefs  or  systems  which  most  truly  develop 
the  life  of  man.  That  idea  or  belief  or  system  which  gives  vital  power  to  men  is 
necessarily  true  and  real.     Cf.  infra,  p.  418. 


182  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  actioi.'-impulse.      If  we  push  popular  thinking  to  an  issue 
about  the  freedom  of  the  will,  it  always  takes  refuge  in  either 
one  or  the  other  of  these  two  ideas,  and  is  therefore  always 
partial,  and  for  that  reason  of  no  great  moment  to  the  in- 
vestigator, whether  the    philosopher   or   the  pathologist.       It 
says  that  man  is  free  either  because  he  can  think  the  things 
that  he  chooses  and  aims  at,  or  because  our  action  ultimately 
rests  on  our  being  able  to  initiate  certain  movements  of  our 
body ;  but  it  is  not  at  all  sure  about  the  relation  of  these  two 
possibilities  to  each  other.     One  can  excuse  popular  thinking 
for  looseness  in   this  matter,  however,  when  one  finds  that 
in   the  same  way  many  psychologists  adopt  the  one  or  the 
other  of  these  positions  alternatively  without  really  bringing 
them  into  connection.     A  psychologist  like  Wundt,  for  ex- 
ample, thinks  of  the  will  as  fundamentally  a  form  of  apper- 
ception— a  fact  of  profound  significance  in  so  far  as  Wundt  is 
professedly  a  physiological  psychologist ;  and   a  psychologist 
like  Eibot  always  thinks   of   the   will  as   a  development  of 
the  action-impulse  common  to  all  organic  beings.^     Now  it  is 
undoubtedly  a  property  of    all  organic  matter  to  react  and 
redistribute  its  energy  in  response   to   external  stimulus  or 
"  circumstance  "   or   "  occasion."     The   fact,  indeed,  expressed 
by  the  term  will  is  simply  the  consciousness  a  man  has  of 
himself  when  he  has  acted  in  what  is  called  an  intelligent 
manner  ;   there  is  no  one  thing  called  "  will  "  ;   will  is  simply 
acting  in  an  intelligent  manner,  acting  while  knowing  what 
one  is  doing.     Positive  psychology  understands  by  will  what 
in  German  is  called  die  Herrscliaft  der  Idee  ilher  die  Bcwe- 
ytmg,  the   control    of    movement  or    action    by    intelligence. 
From  Schopenhauer's  standpoint  there  would   be   something 
misleading    in    the    word    Herrschaft    or    control.       Despite 
everything,  one  feels  that  in  him  knowledge  does  not  control 
conduct  at  all ;   it  is  at  best  but  an  accompaniment  of  some 
*  Ribot,  '  Les  Maladies  de  la  Volontd,'  passim. 


THE   BONDAGE   OP   MAN.  183 

conduct,  and  seems  to  affect  only  the  way  m  which  we  seek 
certain  ends,  but  never  the  ends  themselves.  Thi,.,  however, 
is  perhaps  all  tlie  freedom  man  has,  the  freedom  to  work 
in  his  own  way  towards  the  ends  that  Nature  or  God  has 
assigned  to  him  in  the  system  of  things. 

We  must  use  some  care  in  thinking  out  Schopenhauer's 
account  of  the  relation  that  knowledge  sustains  to  action. 
He  does  not  say  that  we  are  merely  conscious  automata, 
machines  wound  up  with  a  certain  consciousness  of  what  we 
are  doing,  although  his  belief  in  the  practical  identity  of 
mind  and  body  almost  commits  him  to  this  view.  "  As  the 
result  of  the  whole  of  this  discussion  of  the  freedom  of  the 
will  and  what  relates  to  it,  we  find  that  although  the  will 
may,  in  itself  and  apart  from  the  phenomenon,  be  called  free 
and  even  oniuipotent,  yet  in  its  particular  phenomena  en- 
lightened by  knowledge,  as  in  men  and  brutes,  it  is  deter- 
mined by  motives  to  which  the  special  character  regulnrly  and 
necessarily  responds,  and  always  in  the  same  way.  We  see^ 
that  because  of  the  possession  on  his  part  of  abstract  or 
rational  knowledge,  man,  as  distinguished  from  the  brutes, 
has  a  choice,  which  only  makes  him  the  scene  of  the  conflict 
of  his  motives  without  ivithdrawing  him  from  their  control."  ^ 
His  teaching  is  thus  to  the  effect — not  that  we  are  conscious 
automata,  but — that  we  are  conscious,  and  that  we  are  auto- 
mata. Still,  in  spite  of  this  allowance  for  the  presence  of 
consciousness  and  the  sense  of  free  initiative,  it  must  be  con- 
fessed that  Schopenhauer  makes  us  feel  or  suspect  that  our 
automatic  tendencies  exercise  almost  a  controlling  influence 
over  our  conscious  actions.  Spinoza  said  that  if  the  stone 
which  my  hand  sends  flying  through  the  air  could  think,  it 
would  think  itself  free.  "  To  this,"  says  Schopenhauer,  "  I  have 
only  one  thing  to  add :   and  the  stone  would  be  quite  right." 

To  physiological  science  conscious  actions  are  simply  auto- 

^  World  as  Will ;  H.  and  K.  's  transl.,  I  388.     The  italics  are  mine. 


184  schopenhauer'&  system. 

matic  actions  in  the  making,  representing  the  felt  struggle  of 
the  organism  to  do  deliberately  what  it  comes  later  to  do 
naturtilly  and  by  way  of  habit  and  tendency.  Schopenhauer 
takes  pains  to  connect  conscious  actions  as  closely  as  possible 
with  instinctive  actions,  with  merely  physical  or  organic  ac- 
tions. He  insists  that  all  volition  means  bodily  or  organic 
movement,  so  that  the  study  of  the  relation  between  the  will 
and  the  actions  of  the  body  comes  to  mean  simply  the  study 
of  the  relations  existing  between  one  set  of  bodily  acts  and 
another  set  of  other  bodily  acts.  "  There  is  no  causal  con- 
nection whatever  between  acts  of  the  will  and  actions  of  the  body; 
on  the  contrary,  both  are  immediately  one  and  the  same  thing, 
only  perceived  in  a  double  aspect — that  is,  on  the  one  hand, 
in  our  self-consciousness  or  inner  sense,  as  acts  of  the  will ; 
on  the  other,  simultaneously  in  exterior  spatial  brain-percep- 
tion as  actions  of  the  body."  ^  Will  is  at  least  desire,  and 
desire  is  essentially  a  bodily  or  organic  fact,  the  fact  of  in- 
clination towards  or  away  from  certain  objects  or  the  effect 
these  objects  would  produce  on  our  personality.  To  those 
who  hold  that  will  is  essentially  above  desire — decisive,  in 
fact,  about  certain  desires,  repressing  or  encouraging  them 
— Schopenhauer  would  simply  repeat  the  commonplace  of 
modern  psychology,  that  we  are  not  warranted  by  experience 
in  talking  of  any  state  or  operation  of  the  mind  whatever, 
from  cupidity,  say,  or  anger,  iip  to  speculative  thinking  or 
contemplation,  as  having  no  bodily  counterpart.  As  Wundt  "^ 
says,  "  mental  presentations  are  not  (psychical)  substances, 
but  functions."  We  cannot,  that  is,  think  of  our  perceptions 
or  thoughts  ^  as  unique  things  which  exist   merely  "  in  the 

1  Schop.,  Fourfold  Root,  &c.  ;  Eng.  trauBl.,  Bohu,  1889,  p.  93.  The  italics 
are  mine. 

2  Physiol.  Psychol.,  1887,  i.  228. 

*  Wundt  shows  us  how  thoughts  as  well  as  perceptions  represent  organic 
functions  in  the  sixteenth  and  seventeenth  chapters  of  his  '  Psychology ' ;  and 
the  same  thing,  in  considerable  detail,  in  his  'Logic' 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  185 

mind,"  and  which  are  raised  quite  above  the  phenomena  of 
impulse  and  sensation.  It  is  true  that  specuhitive  thought  or 
artistic  contemplation  or  religious  emotion  does  seem  to  draw 
the  mind  away  and  back  from  ordinary  objects  and  ordinary 
pursuits ;  but  this  very  movement  backwards  is,  as  it  were, 
an  organic  or  life -furthering  movement :  it  is  a  movement 
backwards  in  order  that  we  may  go  better  forwards — a  rcciiler 
pour  mieiix  sauter ;  and  so  the  proposition  that  all  move- 
ments or  impulses  of  man  are  simply  sucli  as  are  preserva- 
tive (directly  or  indirectly)  of  his  life  is  unaffected.^  And 
while  Schopenhauer  himself  manifestly  (he  writes  pages  on 
the  nega<"ion  of  the  will  and  of  all  life)  refuses  to  recognise 
all  actions  as  life-preservative  actions,  the  main  tendency  of 
his  system  is  to  the  effect  that  they  are  such.  The  precise 
influence  on  the  will,  however,  of  what  Schopenhauer  calls 
"  the  contemplation  of  the  Ideas,"  is  a  point  which  can  only  be 
discussed  later. 

What  is  here  suggested  about  the  end  of  all  actions  being 
simply  life  and  more  life,  must  be  taken  to  apply  to  the  con- 
duct which  according  to  Matthew  Arnold  is  "  three-fourths  of 
life."  Not  that  there  is  any  possible  fourth  part  of  life  wliich 
cannot  be  explained  in  this  way.  The  life  which  the  higher 
ethical  and  aesthetic  and  religious  aspirations  tend  to  further 
is  a  higher  sort  of  life  than  the  ordinary  activities  of  man 
(to  which  we  are  just  now  in  the  first  instance  referring),  but 
it  is  nevertheless  continuous  with  them ;  it  issues  from  them 
and  returns  upon  them.  Volition  is  not  a  thing  made  up  of 
mechanical  parts,  but  is  the  continuous  exercise  of  the  psycho- 

'  It  may  be  thought  that  the  generaUty  of  this  proposition  is  just  extreme 
enough  to  divest  it  of  any  important  meaning.  The  life  tliat  is  preserved  by 
rehgioua  thought  and  the  life  that  is  preserved  by  eating  food  may  seem  too 
discrepant  to  be  covered  by  a  single  foripula.  Yet  it  is  just  this  very  distinction 
between  "  other-worldliuess  "  and  worldliness,  between  the  ideal  and  the  real, 
between  the  mind  and  the  body,  etc.,  which  the  best  thought  and  feeling  on 
religion  and  art  and  anthropology  since  the  time  of  the  Renaissance  have  been 
and  are  trying  to  destroy. 


186  Schopenhauer's  system. 

physical  force  of  the  individual  for  an  end  (the  development 
of  life)  of  which  he  is  conscious  in  botli  motived  and  impulsive 
action.  To  modern  psychology  there  is  no  essential  distinction 
between  instinctive  acts,  on  the  one  hand,  like  breathing  or  the 
twisting  of  the  lips  as  the  result  of  a  bitter  taste  or  of  disgust 
or  the  desire  of  association  with  other  human  beings,  and 
actions,  on  the  other  hand,  where  we  are  conscious  of  a  definite 
end,  like  fencing,  or  investing  money,  or  aiming  at  goodness : 
all  of  these  actions  are  simply  actions  which  further  or  develop 
our  personality  and  help  us  better  to  attain  to  the  one  end  of 
life,  which  to  Schopenhauer,  as  to  Darwin  and  Spencer,  is  not 
so  much  happiness  as  the  furtherance  of  the  life  of  the  in- 
dividual and  the  species.  Instinctive  actions  are  actions 
which  are  produced  in  us  without  any  conscious  purpose  on 
our  part,  as  when  we  blink  under  too  much  sunlight,  or  when 
we  cough ;  and  all  the  instinctive  actions  of  the  body  form  a 
system  ranging  from  the  merely  physiological  reflex  actions, 
such  as  breathing  and  digestion,  up  to  the  psychical  reflex 
actions,  such  as  rushing  out  of  darkness  or  poisoned  air,  or  the 
desire  of  food,  or  love,  or  hate ;  so  that  there  is  no  lasting 
conflict  possible  between  our  different  instinctive  actions : 
physiological  reflex  actions  do  not  permanently  interfere  with 
psychical  reflex  actions  or  actions  that  are  half  physiological 
and  half  psychical ;  and  the  different  psychical  instinctive 
actions  do  not  permanently  interfere  with  the  physiological 
reflex  actions,  but  at  most  only  partly  determine  or  direct 
them.  Schopenhauer,  we  repeat,  did  not  grasp  this  idea  of  the 
system  of  the  different  impulses  and  reflex  actions  even  so  far 
as  the  ordinary  actions  of  life  went,  but  his  doctrine  of  man 
rests  upon  a  rigid  determinism  of  thought  and  action.  That 
he  did  not  see  an  organic  connection  between  the  very  highest 
impulses  of  man's  life,  such  as  the  feeling  after  perfect 
goodness  or  perfect  benevolence,  and  the  apparently  lower 
or  merely  life  -  sustaining  actions,  is  a  point  which  we  shall 


THE    BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  187 

discuss  in  dealing  with  his  ethical  and  religious  thought.  If 
he  had  grasped  this  connection,  he  would  have  made  out  true 
morality  and  true  religion  to  bo  positive  and  not  merely 
negative  things,  to  represent  not  merely  a  renunciation  and  a 
denial,  but  also  a  pursuit  and  affirmation.  It  is  indeed  not 
an  easy  problem  to  get  over  the  apparent  dualism  between  the 
rational  self  and  the  organic  self.  For  of  course  we  are 
dealing  here  neither  with  the  complete  saint  nor  with  the 
complete  sinner,  but  simply  with  the  ordinary  man  in  whom 
the  dualism  between  the  rational  self  and  the  physical  or 
natural  self  is  not  effectually  overcome.  The  ordinary  man 
is  simply  seeking  as  best  he  can  to  further  his  life  and  his 
happiness ;  both  his  higher  thoughts  and  his  unconscious 
tendencies  are  all  in  that  direction. 

The  higher  desires  and  motives  which  lead  to  rational  action 
do  seem,  it  must  be  confessed,  very  far  from  having  merely 
physiological  or  organic  causes,  even  although  their  very  pres- 
ence and  recurrence  in  consciousness  is  doubtless  conditioned 
by  the  normal  performance  ■  of  countless  physical  and  organic 
functions,  such  as  the  regular  flow  of  the  blood  in  the  capillary 
tubes  and  in  the  brain,  and  so  on.  It  may  indeed  seem  like 
wilfully  ignoring  the  psychological  point  of  view  to  think  of 
conscious  actions  too  closely  in  connection  with  physiological 
processes,  but  Schopenhauer  is  instructive  about  volition  just 
on  this  very  point.  We  forget  too  easily  that  the  psycholo- 
gical point  of  view  in  regard  to  consciousness  is  itself  an 
"  abstract  "  point  of  view, — that  there  is,  in  reality,  no  con- 
sciousness of  what  is  purely  "  psychical "  or  purely  mental. 
All  ideas  and  thoughts  are  really  mental  functions,  and  mental 
functions  are  also  at  the  same  time  organic  or  corporeal  func- 
tions ;  we  have  always  a  feeling,  even  though  it  is  only  vague, 
of  our  mental  and  corporeal  unity.  As  soon  as  psychology 
gave  up  the  idea  prevalent  in  the  eighteenth  century  that  the 
particular  isolated   sensation   is  the   simplest  datura  of  con- 


188  Schopenhauer's  system. 

sciousnesa,  and  recognised  the  fact  that  the  lumplest  kind  of 
sensation  is  the  sensation-impulse,  it  had  virtually  abandoned 
the  study  of  consciousness  as  the  cognisance  of  merely  internal 
phenomena  or  of  purely  psychical  states.  Consciousnes.s  as  a 
knowledge  or  experience  of  reality  oscillates,  as  we  have  seen, 
between  the  two  extremes  ^  of  the  cognisance  of  external 
objects  and  the  cognisance  of  the  self.  Generally  speaking, 
we  are  conscious  of  our  activity  in  relation  to  objects  and 
persons  round  about  us.  The  will  is  the  attitude  we  take  to 
certain  objects  or  certain  circumstances ;  it  is  the  reaction 
of  "  the  within  "  on  "  the  without."  It  may  be  more  than 
that,  but  it  is  at  least  that,  and  has  to  be  explained  as  that. 
We  often  know  the  causes  or  the  precise  circumstances  of  our 
actions,  but  we  very  often  do  not.  I  do  not  exactly  know  lohy 
I  am  running  from  under  a  falling  body  when  I  am  doing  it, 
nor  do  I  exactly  know  why  a  certain  kind  of  music  gives  me 
more  pleasure  than  another  kind,  nor  why  I  tend  to  bite  my 
lips  when  I  am  thinking.  There  does  seem,  of  course,  to  be 
some  inward  initiative  in  choice.  Am  I  not  free  in  choosing  ?  "^ 
Schopenhauer  teaches  that  choice  is  hard  to  explain,  for  the 
reasons  referred  to  in  the  chapter  on  his  Theory  of  Know- 
ledge— viz.,  that  motives  and  actions  are  phenomena  where 
cause  and  effect  get  more  and  more  different  from  each  other, 
and  almost,  in  fact,  come  to  seem  discrepant,  as  when  a  "  mere 
idea  "  or  a  "  mere  reflection  "  calls  forth  some  action  or  other. 
Still  he  insists  that  there  are  and  must  be  connecting-links 
between  motives  and  actions,  between  ideas  and  actions,  and 
that  the  careful  thinker  will  always  insist  on  finding  these 
connections,  or  at  least  on  allowing  for  their  presence. 

Schopenhauer  assumes,  then,  that  given  certain  ideas  and 
circumstances,  only  one  course  of  action  is  the  natural  reaction 
movement  for  the  mind  or  the  organism  to  make,  and  also 
that  it  can  (if  we  investigate  far  enough)  always  be  explained 

1  Cf.  supra,  chap.  iii.  p.  167.  '  Cf.  supra,  chap.  i.  p.  2. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  189 

in  a  perfectly  positive  and  natural  way  why  certain  ideas 
should  arise  in  the  mind  in  certain  circunistances.  Modern 
psychology  explains  the  latter  phenomenon  by  the  aid  of 
the  two  ideas — first,  that  the  highest  life  is  the  end  of  all 
action ;  and,  secondly,  that  whatever  the  intellect  even  specu- 
lates about  or  only  instructs  a  man  about  in  a  purely  positive 
way,  can  always  be  shown  to  be  something  that  makes  for  his 
highest  life  or  highest  welfare.  Schopenhauer  recognises  the 
first  of  these  two  principles  in  tlie  doctrine  (which  pervades 
his  whole  philosophy)  that  life  is  will,  and  that  there  is 
no  limit  to  willing ;  and  the  second  by  insisting  that  all 
motives  arise  through  the  presence  of  conceptions  in  the  mind, 
the  sole  end  of  conceptions  being  to  furnish  man  with  motives 
to  action.  That  the  supreme  end  of  action  is  simply  the  high- 
est life,  is  what  few  minds  would  now,  at  the  end  of  this 
century  and  in  the  light  of  all  the  other  centuries,  care  to 
deny.  It  seems,  however,  rather  a  large  assertion  to  maintain 
that  the  only  function  of  conceptions  or  thouf/hts  is  to  give  us 
motives,  and  yet  it  is  just  this  that  Schopenhauer  teaches  per- 
haps more  emphatically  and  persistently  than  any  other  single 
thing.  "  Our  intellect  is  originally  designed  only  to  hold 
before  the  mere  will  of  the  individual  its  petty  ends,  and 
so  only  apprehends  the  relations  of  things  [to  the  will],  and 
does  not  penetrate  into  their  inward  nature,  into  their  proper 
essence.  It  is  accordingly  a  merely  surface-energy,  getting 
hold  only  on  the  surfaces  of  things,  on  mere  species  transitivas, 
and  not  on  the  real  essence  of  things."  ^  The  merely  practi- 
cal utility  of  reason  is  here  definitely  asserted.  To  apply  the 
intellect  to  speculation  about  the  nature  of  things  initially 
conceived  as  outside  ourselves  is  to  Schopenhauer  absurd. 
And  he  is  right.  "We  have  to  give  up  altogether  that  way  of 
looking  at  reality,  and  to  find  the  meaning  of  the  world  within 
our  volitions  and  purposes  which  represent  and  tend  to  com- 

1  Werke,  iii.  325. 


190  Schopenhauer's  system. 

plete  a  cosmic  evolution  transcending  altogether  the  compre- 
hension of  our  intellects.  Most  men  find  that — whatever  view 
they  may  have  <it  one  time  taken  of  thought — the  best  thing 
they  can  do  with  all  thoughts  is  to  apply  them  to  life. 

The  merely  ijractical  value  of  reason  could,  of  course,  be 
proved  only  by  showing  that  all  the  chief  conceptions  of  the 
mind  can  be  reduced  to  the  level  of  being  essentially  ideas 
for  the  will  or  ideas  for  action,  and  that  all  possible  mental 
conceptions  have  significance  only  as  ideas  that  ultimately  aid 
action.  All  this,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  is  the  outcome  of  Scho- 
penhauer's philosophy,  wliicli  rests  on  the  fact  that  we  know 
reality  only  as  affecting  our  will  and  our  action  and  our  de- 
velopment. A  little  reflection  may  convince  us,  for  example, 
that  even  such  a  conception  as  that  of  "  being,"  with  which 
Hegel  begins  his  '  Logic,'  is  inexplicable  save  through  the  idea 
of  function,  of  definitely  occupying,  as  Hegel  himself  suggests, 
a  particular  place  at  a  particular  time ;  and  that  the  concep- 
tion of  "  non-being  "  may  be  reduced  to  the  idea  of  that  which 
does  not  affect  our  activity  at  all ;  while  the  conception  of 
"  becoming  "  is  probably  nothing  apart  from  the  experience  of 
evolving  activity ;  and  it  is  to  be  remembered  in  all  three 
cases  that  activity  or  function  means  activity  or  function  in 
relation  to  some  irov  orw,  some  ininctum  stans  or  other,  and  that, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  movements  of  man's  life,  such  as  his 
planting  the  seed  in  the  spring,  and  his  going  to  sleep  at  night, 
are  by  common  consent  taken  to  be  the  movements  to  which 
all  other  movements,  from  those  of  the  solar  system  to  those 
of  microscopic  cells,  are  to  be  referred.  All  this,  indeed,  opens 
up  a  most  serious  line  of  philosophic  consideration;  and  Scho- 
penhauer himself  is  impressed  by  it.  In  particular  he  is  struck 
by  the  strange  or  perverse  character  of  the  idea  of  philosophers 
that  philosophy  should  be  able  to  tell  us  about  the  nature  of 
the  world  out  of  all  relation  to  our  will.  "  In  philosophy  the 
intellect  is  applied  to  something  for  whicli  it  is  not  at  all  made 


THE   BONDAGE  OF   MAN.  191 

or  intended — namely,  existence  in  general  in-ancl- for- itself. 
Its  first  tendency  therein  naturally  is  to  apply  the  laws  of  the 
phenomenal  (which  alone  it  knows)  to  being-in-general,  and 
so  to  construe  the  laws  of  existence  in  general  in  terms  of  the 
laws  of  the  merely  phenomenal,  for  example,  to  seek  the  be- 
ginning and  the  end,  the  cause,  and  the  ends  of  existence  in 
general.  So  all  philosophy  is  at  the  outset  dogmatism.  After 
the  failure  of  this  kind  of  philosophy  and  the  exhibition  of  its 
failure,  which  is  scepticism,  criticism  finally  comes."  ^  Into 
this  view  of  the  limits  of  human  thought  it  is  impossible  to 
enter  just  now.  We  shall  refer  to  it  when  dealing  with 
Schopenhauer's  metaphysic.  It  is  only  necessary  to  present  it 
just  now  to  show  that  Schopenhauer  believes  in  the  theoretical 
bondage  of  man's  intellect  as  well  as  in  the  practical  bondage 
of  his  will. 

As  to  the  latter,  it  is  not  yet  obvious  that  our  highest  voli- 
tional consciousness,  our  deliberate  and  ideational  (ideal  ?)  effort, 
can  be  explained  as  at  bottom  only  physiological  or  organic 
function.  It  is  true,  as  Schopenhauer  suggests,  that  there  is 
no  causal  relation  between  the  will  and  the  bodily  actions,  for 
the  merely  verbal  reason,  if  for  no  other,  that  there  is  no  such 
thing  as  "  will "  in  one  part  of  our  personality  and  actions  in 
some  other  part,  or  on  the  outside,  as  it  were.  Still  the  ques- 
tion of  free  action,  as  every  physiologist  knows,  is  merely  the 
question  of  the  relation  of  so-called  conscious  activity  to  so- 
called  instinctive  or  automatic  or  habit-engendered  activity ; 
and  without  going  at  all  into  the  question  of  the  genesis  of 
consciousness,  it  may  simply  be  said  that  what  Schopenhauer 
suggested  about  consciousness  is  in  the  main  right,  that  what 
we  call  conscious  action  is  as  natural  and  systematic  in  its 
development  and  manifestation  as  automatic  action.  We  never 
"  will "  nothing,  as  it  were,  or  simply  "  will  in  general,"  and 
we  never  "  will "  without  occarion  or  circumstance,  and  it  is 

*  Aus  Schopenhauer'*}  handdchriftlichen  Nachlase,  s.  297. 


192  Schopenhauer's  system. 

psycho -physically  true  that  the  question  of  volition  is  the 
question  of  the  relation  of  the  activity  which  the  contemplation 
of  an  object  or  an  idea  tends  to  awaken  in  us,  to  the  total 
organic  activity  which  results  from  our  natural  constitution. 
"  According  to  all  this,  when  the  will  is  strengthened  by  know- 
ledge, it  always  knows  what  it  wills  noiv  and  here,  never  what 
it  wills  in  general ;  every  particular  act  of  will  has  its  end,  the 
wliole  will  has  none ;  just  as  every  particular  phenomenon  of 
nature  is  determined  by  a  suflicient  cause  so  far  as  concerns  its 
appearance  in  this  place  at  this  time,  but  the  force  which 
manifests  itself  in  it  has  no  general  caune,  for  it  belongs  to  the 
thing  in  itself,  to  the  groundless  will."  ^  Mental  philosophy 
must  be  able  to  solve  the  question  of  fniedom  into  whatever 
form  that  question  may  be  cast,  just  as  philosophy  in  general 
ought  to  be  able  to  begin  anywhere  in  explaining  the  world. 
We  must  learn  from  Schopenhauer  the  sense  in  which  man  is 
not  ahsolutcly  free,  but  free  only  to  seek,  in  the  best  way  he 
can,  the  means  to  the  ends  that  have  been  assigned  to  hira 
by  the  system  of  things.  It  is  psychologically  true  about 
action  that  "  instinct  furnishes  us  with  the  general  or  with 
the  rule,  while  intellect  gives  us  the  particular  or  the  appli- 
cation, in  so  far  as  it  provides  for  the  details  of  the  exe- 
cution of  .in  act ;  and  in  this  way  instinct  adapts  itself  to 
variety  of  circumstance."  ^  The  ideas  and  the  motives  which 
the  intellect  excites  in  us  on  the  occasion  of  action  have  to  do 
only  with  the  best  possible  way  in  which  we  can  realise  oar 
highest  welfare ;  and  our  highest  welfare  is  already  determined 
in  outline  for  us  by  the  natural  system  of  our  impulses  and 
desires  and  tendencies,  and  only  awaits  being  carried  on  to 
its  highest  possible  development  by  the  limitless  exercise  of 
our  conceptual  or  higher  faculties.  Man's  freedom  lies  in  his 
being  able  to  fasten  Ms  mind  or  consciousness  upon  ever  higher 

1  Welt  als  Wille,  i.  196 ;  H.  and  K.,  i.  215.     The  italics  are  mine. 

-  Schop.,  Freilieit  des  Willens.  —  ■ 


THE    BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  193 

and  higher  coiicrptions  of  his  highest  welfare.  This  is  surely 
what  those  Libertarians  inust  mean,  who,  like  Professor 
Caldervvood,^  rightly  contend  that  man's  freedom  lies  in 
his  intelligence  and  in  his  power  of  directing  his  thoughts. 
Schopenhauer's  thought  rests  securely  upon  the  position  that 
there  is  a  perfect  natural  history  of  the  thoughts  and  ideas 
and  motives  of  every  individual,  and  that  what  any  individual 
at  one  moment  of  time  thinks  of  executing  by  way  of  voli- 
tionary  effort,  is  or  has  been  strictly  determined  by  the  ne- 
cessities of  his  inborn  character  and  of  the  circumstances  in 
which  he  tinds  himself ;  just  as  what  he  in  general  desires 
or  wills — his  own  welfare,  say,  or  that  of  others — is  or  has 
been  determined  by  the  constitution  or  system  of  organised 
tendencies  which  Nature  or  God  gave  him  at  birth. 

Is  there  anything,  after  all,  so  unsatisfactory  about  the 
teaching  of  determinism  (which  Schopenhauer  uccv:pts)  that 
all  the  actions  of  an  individual  are  strictly  determined  by 
the  necessities  of  his  nature  and  character  on  the  one  hand 
and  his  environment  on  the  other  ?  There  are  many  who 
agree  with  a  writer  already  quoted  ^  when  he  says,  "  But, 
taking  the  deterministic  view  of  the  world,  the  highest  mor- 
ality is  possible.  One  proof  is  that  some  fatalists  are  rigidly 
moral.  A  psychological  analysis  will  show  that  the  persons 
who  are  loved  and  esteemed  are  those  whose  very  nature  is  to  do 
good — that  is,  they  would  not  and  could  not  see  a  fellow-being 
suffer ;  it  is  from  the  necessity  of  their  nature,  they  were  from 
infancy  of  a  kind  disposition.  We  admire  the  sturdy  nature 
who,  by  long  struggle,  has  reached  the  moral  goal ;  but  we 
cannot  love  him  always.  He  is  not  always  of  a  kind  disposi- 
tion ;  this  is  not  a  necessity  of  his  nature."  Schopenhauer  is 
also  very  enrphatic  on  the  point  that  the  only  thing  we  really 
love  and  admire  in  people  is  an  inward  good  nature,  a  good 

'  Handbook  of  Moral  Philosophy,  chapter  on  the  Freedom  of  the  Will. 
2  A.  Macdonald,  op.  cit.,  p.  38. 


194  Schopenhauer's  system. 

heart.  Christianity  teaclies  the  same  thing.  Still  we  feel 
that  the  intellect  has  something  to  do  with  the  formation  of 
character.  Perhaps  if  we  can  satisfactorily  point  out  the 
share  which  the  intellect  has  in  the  formation  of  character, 
there  will  be  less  objection  to  the  acceptance  of  the  general 
proposition  about  actions  being,  like  everything  else  in  nature, 
determined  both  in  their  outlines  and  in  their  details.  We 
may  learn  from  Schopenhauer  that  reflection  itself  or  thought 
is  at  least  an  instinct,  although  the  highest  instinct  we  have. 
If  so,  if  it  is  an  instinct,  it  has  a  natural  history  like  any 
other  instinct — as  a  matter  of  fact,  that  whole  growth  in 
inwardness  and  complexity  which  is  represented  by  the  highly 
specialised  central  organs  of  the  nervous  system  in  the  higher 
animals.  But  if  thought  is  an  instinct,  and  has,  as  such,  a 
natural  history,  we  may  expect  that  to  be  true  about  thought 
which  we  found  to  be  true  of  all  instincts — viz.,  that  the 
efforts  it  constrains  man  to  make  are  always  efforts  after  the 
highest  possible  life,  which  in  man  is  self-conscious  life,  con- 
sciousness of  himself  as  a  real  co-v/orker  with  the  Absolute 
Will  in  the  evolution  of  the  limitless  purpose  which  runs 
through  all  things,  and  is  chronicled  and  suggested  in  a 
thousand  ways. 

The  only  freedom  that  man  has,  according  to  Schopen- 
hauer, is  that  of  guiding  his  conduct  by  his  conceptions ;  but 
this  only  means  the  objective  possibility  of  the  conduct  of  man 
being  of  very  many  different  phases,  and  not  the  subjective 
'possibility  of  a  man's  choosing  to  be  and  to  do  whatever  he 
likes.  M^n  must  somehow  learn  wherein  his  highest  welfare 
consists,  and  the  perception  or  the  idea  of  that  will  call  forth 
new  motives  in  him,  which  will  in  their  turn  effect  a  re- 
organisation of  the  system  of  tendencies  which  make  up  his 
life.  In  this  way  he  may  become  more  free — that  is,  less  and 
less  the  meij  sport  of  what  his  past  has  determined  him  to 
be.     The  majority  of  men  are  the  slaves  of  custom,  and  of 


THE   BONDAGE    OF   MAN.  195 

prejudice,  and  of  ignorance,  too,  so  far  as  any  real  idea  of 
their  true  welfare  goes ;  they  cannot  therefore  be  properly 
said  to  be  free,  at  all.  Men  like  Calvin  and  Augustine,  and 
indeed  all  leaders  and  physicians  of  mankind,  have  seen 
this.  Determine  a  man's  thoughts  and  you  determine  him. 
The  thoughts  of  most  men  are  determined  by  their  liorizon, 
by  the  circumstances  and  the  spirit  of  the  times  in  which 
they  live.  "  In  various  passages  of  my  works  I  have  argued 
that  whilst  a  lower  animal  pj.3..jsses  nothing  more  than  the 
generic  character  of  its  species,  man  is  the  only  being  which 
can  lay  claim  to  possess  an  individual  character.  But  in 
most  men  this  individual  character  comes  to  very  little  in 
reality ;  and  they  may  be  almost  all  ranged  under  certain 
classes :  ce  sont  des  csp^ces}  Their  thoughts  and  desires,  like 
their  faces,  are  these  of  the  species,  or,  at  any  rate,  those 
of  the  class  to  which  tbey  belong ;  and  accordingly  they  are 
of  a  trivial,  everyday,  commoi*  character,  and  exist  by  the 
thousand.  You  can  usually  tell  beforehand  what  they  are 
likely  to  do  and  say.  They  have  no  special  stamp  or  mark 
to  distinguish  them ;  they  are  like  manufactured  goods,  all 
of  a  piece.  If,  then,  their  nature  is  merged  in  that  of  the 
species,  how  shall  their  existence  go  beyond  it  ?  The  curse 
of  vulgarity  puts  men  on  a  par  with  the  lower  animals,  by 
allowing  them  none  but  a  generic  nature,  a  generic  form  of 
existence."  ^ 

^  Cf.  a  very  common  expression  of  the  denizens  of  the  Quartier  Latin  of  Paris 
— "  Toi !  .  .  .  espfice  de  type  ! " 

-  Schop.,  Werke,  vi.  633  ;  Psychol.  Bemerk.  B.  Saunders,  Studies  in  Pes- 
simism, pp.  6r),  66. 

A  leading  sociologist  (Professor  L.  Gumplowicz)  is  so  convinced  of  the  fact  that 
the  thoughts  of  men  are  purely  the  result  of  their  social  environment,  that  he 
denies  outright  the  so-called  freedom  of  the  individual :  "Allcr  Glaubo  an  die 
Freiheit  des  Meuschen,  an  sein  freies  Handeln  wurzelt  in  der  Ansicht,  dass  die 
Handlungen  des  Menschen  Friichte  seiner  Gedanken  sind,  diese  aber  die  eigenste 
Domiine  des  Individuums,  sein  ausschliessliches  Eigenthuni  sind.  Lctztercs  nun 
ill  cin  Irrthum.  Ebensowenig  wie  er  sich  physisch  selbat  erzeugt,  ebenso  wenig 
geiatig.     Seine  Gedanken,  sein  Qeist  sind  das  Erzeugniss  eines  socialen  Mediums, 


196  Schopenhauer's  system. 

A  modern  Libertarian — and  he  is  somewhat  hard  to  find 
now — has  to  grant  the  psychological  fact  that  an  "  idea  "  is 
always  ajjt  to  call  up  a  movement, — that,  in  fact,  attention  to 
an  idea  is  a  movement,  apt  after  more  or  less  quick  mental 
conflict  to  complete  itself  by  a  definite  bodily  movement. 
The  mind  of  a  healthy  man  contains  a  store,  as  it  were, 
of  pent-up  energy  wliich  is  apt  to  explode  in  any  direction 
that  may  prove  to  be,  in  given  circumstances,  the  line  of 
least  resistance.  Still  our  Libertarian  holds  that  the  power 
of  attention  or  reflection  ensures  the  freedom  of  the  will, 
seeing  that  that  power  is  a  power  of  turning  our  thoughts 
in  any  direction,  either  towards  or  away  from  desires.  The 
strict  psychologist  will  answer  this  along  a  line  of  thought 
entered  upon  and  partly  worked  out  by  Schopenhauer.  The 
freedom  of  thought,  he  will  remind  us,  is  strictly  limited. 
Objectively,  a  man  may  put  any  two  ideas  or  any  two  ele- 
ments together  in  his  brain ;  and  so  objectively  thought 
is  "  free "  in  so  far  as  a  man  may  be  thinking  about  any- 
thing, for  all  we  know ;  but  subjectively  a  luan  never  does 
think  about  "  anything,"  but  always  about  something,  and 
moreover,  about  something  which,  disguise  it  as  he  may,  is 
felt  by  him  at  that  moment  to  be  conducive  to  his  welfare. 
Hegel  argues  very  much  in  this  way  in  talking  about  the  idea 
of  the  possible.  In  ahstracto  anything  is  possible,  but  in  reality 
possibilities  are  always  narrowed  down  to  one  course.  Wise 
men  know  this,  and  refrain  from  talking  about  the  merely 
possible.  "Just  as  little  as  a  body  can  be  set  into  motion 
without  a  cause,  so  it  is  impossible  that  a  thought  can  enter 
consciousness  without  occasion.  The  occasion  may  be  an 
outer  circumstance,  like  an  impression  on  the  senses,  or  an 
inner   circumstance — that   is,  another   thought   which   brings 

ties  aocialen  Elements,  in  dem  er  entsteht,  in  deui  er  lebt  und  webt." — Grundriss 
der  Sociologie,  s.  171.  The  reading  of  works  on  Criminology  and  Sociology  firmly 
convinces  one  of  the  fact  that  the  thoughts  of  the  individual  are  to  be  traced  to 
his  euviroumeut. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAX.  197 

along  still  another  with  it  by  way  of  association."  ^  Often, 
indeed,  we  are  unable  on  reflection  to  bring  into  explicit 
consciousness  all  the  causes  or  motives  that  have  affected 
our  will  in  the  process  of  coming  to  a  decision,  and  therefore 
are  also  unable  to  trace  the  necessity  of  the  decision  actually 
made,  and  thus,  to  quote  our  author,  it  "  seems  to  the  intellect 
that  in  a  given  case  two  opposite  decisions  are  possible  for 
the  will.  But  this  is  just  the  same  thing  as  if  we  were  to 
say  of  the  perpendicular  beam  that  had  lost  its  balance  and 
is  hesitating  which  way  to  fall,  that  it  can  fall  either  to  the 
right  hand  or  the  left.  Tliis  case  has  only  a  subjective 
significance,  and  only  means  as  far  as  the  data  known  to 
us  are  concerned."  ^  This  desci-iption  is  certainly  true  of  the 
actions  of  all  men  who  do  not  always  follow  some  invariable 
standard  fixed  for  them  independently  of  their  own  will. 
They  are  in  a  state  of  unstable  equilibrium  until  some 
circumstance,  some  occasion  or  other,  precipitates  their  action 
along  some  definite  line.  They  are  more  determined  than 
free.  In  real  love,  for  example, — and  Schopenhauer  uses  this 
illustration  very  often, — the  grounds  of  choice  are  far  more 
unconscious  than  conscious.  In  Schopenhauer's  language, 
knowledge  is  subservient  to  the  will,  and  in  the  language 
of  psychology  freedom  of  choice  is  only  freedom  to  seek 
that  which  is  judged  to  be  conducive  to  welfare ;  and  a  man's 
judgment  as  to  what  is  conducive  to  his  welfare  is  a  natural 
product  of  the  joint  action  of  his  original  nature  and  the  per- 
ceptions or  impressions  he  has  by  virtue  of  his  environment 
been  submitted  to.  As  Schopenhauer  puts  it,  the  will  is  the 
sum-total  of  the  motor  forces  that  are  brought  to  bear  on  a  man, 
and  these  necessitate  action  just  as  hydrogen  and  oxygen  in 
certain  proportions  make  water.  The  most  of  these  forces, 
further,  are  forces  native  to  man's  constitution  which  he  did 

1  Welt  als  Wille,  ii.  145. 

a  World  as  Will,  &c. ;  Eng.  transl.,  H.  and  K.,  i.  375. 


198  Schopenhauer's  system. 

not  make ;  and  the  forces  of  which  he  is  conscious,  his 
motives,  are  a  natural  evolution  from  the  forces  which  are 
instinctive  and  reflex  and  automatic — an  evolution,  that  is, 
which  he  can  no  more  help  than  he  can  help  running  to  one 
side  when  threatened  with  danger  from  a  falling  body.  All 
organic  matter  has  a  tendency  to  react  in  certain  ways  when 
subjected  to  what  is  called  stimulus  or  excitation,  and  man's 
will  is  no  exception  to  this  general  rule.  It  is  a  power  he  has 
of  reacting  in  response  to  the  various  stimuli  to  action  which 
he  finds  in  himself  and  outside  of  himself ;  it  can  no  more  act 
without  impulses  and  motives  than  electric  force  can  act 
without  a  circuit;  and  the  very  fact  that  many  of  man's 
motives  arise  out  of  impulses  that  are  natural  to  him,^  shows 
that  his  conduct  cannot  be  fully  explained  from  the  mere 
standpoint  of  his  consciousness,  for  his  consciousness  only 
finds  these  impulses  and  does  not  make  them. 

It  is  impossible  here  to  discuss  in  detail  the  psychology  of 
deliberative  or  rational  or  consciously -chosen  action.  The 
philosophical  mind  ought  simply  to  remember  the  maxim, 
Natura  non  facit  saltum.  There  is  a  natural  history  of  the 
will  and  of  the  intellect,  just  as  there  is  of  the  act  of  walking, 
of  visual  perception,  or  of  the  association  of  ideas ;  and  there 
is  a  normal  condition  of  mental  health,  just  as  of  bodily 
health  in  general,  of  which  mental  health  is  only  one  aspect. 
No  doubt  we  are  in  ail  this  assuming  the  action  of  thought 
and  the  power  of  thought ;  but  thought  is  a  perfectly  natural 
activity  or  an  activity  having  a  natural  mode  of  operation,  and 
having  nothing  arbitrary  or  spasmodic  about  its  procedure. 
The  presence  of  thought  means  the  possibility  of  combining 
in  an  ideal  or  mental  synthesis  any  two  elements  of  experi- 
ence ;  but  any  mental  combination  is  a  mental  function  initia- 

'  That  is,  many  motives  are  constituted  by  our  simply  identifying  certain 
natural  impulses  {e.g.,  the  gregarious  instinct  or  family  affection)  with  our 
personality. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  199 

tive  of  action,  a  function  which  is,  in  fact,  incipient  action,  or 
action  viewed  from  within,  and  we  know  from  the  doctrine  of 
natural  selection  in  general  that  there  is  a  process  of  natural 
selection  among  ideas.  For  though  all  ideas  engender  move- 
ments, only  those  movements  can  be  executed  which  do  not 
conflict  with  the  whole  established  system  of  physical  and 
psychical  reflexes  which  constitute  after  years  and  ages  of  ex- 
perience the  normal  activity  of  the  human  organism.  Scho- 
penhauer was  perfectly  right  in  insisting  that  the  natural 
intellect  is  simply  the  servant  of  the  natural  will  for  the 
selection  of  ideas,  which  in  turn  determine  courses  of  conduct 
that  are  subservient  to  the  one  great  end  of  the  highest  life. 
Unlimited  freedom  of  choice  is  never  realised  by  any  in- 
dividual. No  one  man  car  be  anything  he  likes ;  he  can 
only  take  any  means  his  intellect  knows  to  be  possible  to  the 
one  end  of  life — the  highest  life  for  self  or  for  others.  In- 
deed the  intellect  of  man  is  wholly  at  the  service  of  his 
practical  nature,  and  fulfils  its  highest  function  in  telling  him 
as  an  individual  the  means  by  which  alone  he  can  attain  to 
what  is  for  him  the  highest  life.  "  But,  like  all  the  rest, 
nature  takes  this  last  step  also  in  extending  and  perfecting 
the  brain,  and  thereby  in  increasing  the  powers  of  knowledge, 
only  in  consequence  of  the  increased  needs,  thus  in  the  service 
of  the  imll.  What  this  aims  at  and  attains  in  man  is  indeed 
essentially  the  same,  and  not  more  than  what  is  also  its  goal 
in  the  brutes — nourishment  and  propagation."  ^  Schopenhauer 
holds  that  until  a  man  obtains  a  real  knowledge  of  himself, 
he  is  more  "  impelled  from  behind "  by  blind  impulses  than 
"  guided  from  ahead "  through  the  presence  of  controlling 
ideas.  "  In  order  to  recognise,  as  something  original  and  un- 
conditioned, that  exceedingly  strong  tendency  of  all  animals 
and  men  to  retain  life  and  carry  it  on  as  long  as  possible — 
a  tendency  which  was  set  forth  above  as  characteristic  of  the 

1  World  as  Will,  Eng.  transl,  iii.  15. 


200  Schopenhauer's  system. 

subjective,  or  of  the  will — it  is  necessary  to  make  clear  to 
ourselves  that  this  is  by  no  means  the  result  of  any  objective 
knoioledge  of  the  worth  of  life,  but  is  independent  of  all  know- 
ledge ;  or,  in  other  words,  that  those  beings  exhibit  themselves, 
not  as  drawn  from  in  front,  but  as  impelled  from  behind."^ 

Only  when  a  man  obtains  a  perfect  knowledge  of  what  he 
himself  is  can  it  be  at  all  said  that  his  conduct  is  guided  by 
knowledge  or  by  conceptions,  and  this  self-knowledge,  this 
perfect  self  -  knowledge,  only  comes  from  the  experience 
of  many  unfulfilled  and  many  accidentally  fulfilled  aims. 
What  Schopenhauer  calls  ohjedivity  of  intellect,  the  seeing  of 
things  in  their  true  light,  is  an  acquisition  and  not  a  pos- 
session at  the  outset.  Our  acquired  character,  he  maintains, 
is  an  established  tendency  or  disposition  to  act  or  think  in  ac- 
cordance with  what  we  have  learned  about  life,  and  about  the 
possibilities  and  limitations  of  the  nature  with  which  we  are 
endowed  at  birth.  Self-knowledge  to  most  people  brings  in 
the  first  instance  a  sense  of  disappointment  and  limitation 
rather  than  of  boundless  possibility  of  fulfilment  or  of  bound- 
less freedom.  "  For  just  as  a  fish  can  only  get  on  in  water, 
and  a  bird  in  the  air,  and  the  mole  under  the  earth,  so  can 
every  individual  man  only  get  on  in  the  atmosphere  that  is 
suited  to  him ;  court  life,  for  example,  is  a  thing  that  some 
people  can't  breathe.  .  ,  .  We  have  first  to  learn  from  experi- 
ence what  we  will  and  what  we  can ;  before  that  we  do  not 
know  this  at  all,  we  are  without  a  character,  and  have  often, 
through  hard  strokes  from  the  outside,  to  be  driven  back  on 
to  our  own  way.  Once  we  have  learned  this,  however,  then 
we  have  got  what  men  call  character,  acquired  character."  ^ 
He  goes  on  to  say  that  this  is  just  an  exact  knowledge  of 
our  unchangeable  qualities  and  characteristics,  of  our  mental 
and  physical  capacity,  of  the  strength  and  the  weakness  of 

1  Welt  als  WiUe,  ii.  402  ;  H.  and  K.,  iii.  110. 

2  Welt  ale  Wille,  i.  359. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF    MAN.  201 

our  individuality.  And  again :  "  At  last  we  learn  to  know 
ourselves  as  quite  different  from  what  we  took  ourselves  to 
be  a  'priori,  and  we  are  then  often  terrified  at  what  we  really 
are."  Not  only  "  he  who  wills  to  be  great "  must  learn  to 
"  limit "  himself,  but  he  who  would  really  deliberately  will 
anything  at  all.  For  me  as  an  individual  at  any  one  moment 
of  time  there  is  only  one  thing  which  is  the  rational  and 
the  natural  thing  for  me  to  do ;  and  life  is  simply  the  play 
of  forces  and  tendencies  and  vague  strivings  until  we  learn 
by  experience  and  by  knowledge  what  that  one  thing  is. 
The  fully-developed  man  knows  in  every  situation  in  life 
just  exactly  what  he  can  and  therefore  must  do,  and  does 
it :  the  possibilities  of  action  are  for  him  narrowed  down  to 
one  definite  course,  and  in  order  to  act  differently  from  that 
he  would  need  to  be  a  different  man. 

II.  All  Schopenhauer's  wisdom  of  life  rests  upon  this 
line  of  thought,  which  is  the  quintessence  of  fact.  It  is 
satisfactory  to  read  what  he  says  about  men  and  things, 
because  he  always  sees  intuitively  the  necessity  or  the  "  in- 
wardness" of  the  person  or  of  the  situation,  and  everything 
he  portrays  as  being  said  or  being  done  seems  to  follow  just 
from  the  necessity  of  the  character  or  the  situation  in  ques- 
tion. "Nature  is  not  like  those  bad  poets  who,  in  setting 
a  fool  or  a  knave  before  us,  do  their  work  so  clumsily  and 
with  such  evident  design,  that  you  might  almost  fancy  you 
saw  the  poet  standing  behind  each  of  his  characters  and 
continually  disavowing  their  sentiments,  and  telling  you  in  a 
tone  of  warning :  This  is  a  knave  ;  that  is  a  fool ;  do  not  mind 
what  he  says.  But  Nature  goes  to  work  like  Shakespeare 
and  Goethe,  poets  who  make  every  one  of  their  characters — 
even  if  it  is  the  devil  himself ! — appear  to  be  quite  in  the 
right  for  the  moment  that  they  come  before  us  in  their 
several  parts ;   the  characters  are  described  so  objectively  that 


202  Schopenhauer's  system. 

they  excite  our  interest  and  compel  us  to  sympathise  with 
their  point  of  view ;  for,  like  the  works  of  Nature,  every  one 
of  their  characters  is  evolved  as  the  result  of  some  hidden  law 
or  principle  wliich  makes  all  they  say  and  do  appear  natural 
and  therefore  necessary.  And  you  will  always  be  the  prey  or 
plaything  of  the  devils  and  fools  in  this  world,  if  you  expect 
to  see  them  going  about  with  their  horns  or  jangling  their 
bells."  ^  Schopenhauer  always  explains  completely  in  ex- 
plaining men  and  things,  because  he  always  explains  them 
from  the  necessity  of  the  case.  All  a  man's  knowledge  simply 
shows  him  his  relation  to  the  world  of  which  he  is  a  part, 
and  all  knowledge  ought  to  end  in  self-knowledge,  which  is 
the  knowledge  of  how  one  is  necessitated  to  act  if  one  means 
to  develop  in  the  only  way  that  is  possible  for  one.  When 
a  man  truly  knows  himself,  he  is  for  the  first  time  free. 
Freedom,  apart  from  all  complicated  considerations  of  juris- 
prudence and  religion  and  ethics,  has  really  a  negative  con- 
notation ;  it  means  an  absence  of  all  the  obstacles  and 
hindrances  to  one's  being  one's  true  self.  And  of  course 
the  essence  of  the  self  consists  in  freely  acting  out  the  end 
which  has  been  assigned  to  it  by  Nature.  We  find  this 
way  of  looking  at  men  as  the  subjects  of  a  necessary  and 
inevitable  process  in  such  a  book  as  the  '  Table-talk '  of 
Napoleon.  The  wise  man  and  the  man  of  experience  always 
judge  of  men  as  necessarily  determined  by  their  nature,  which 
is  written  all  over  their  faces  and  bodies,  and  shows  itself 
in  their  slightest  movements  and  words.  "  A  man  shows  his 
character  just  in  the  way  in  which  he  deals  with  trifles — for 
then  he  is  off  his  guard." 

It  is  not  pretended  that  with  this .  everything  about  human 
action  is  perfectly  clear  and  comprehensible.  It  has  only 
been  suggested   from   Schopenhauer  that,  given   the  power  of 

^  B.  Saundera,  Counsels  and  Maxims  of  Schopenhauer,  pp.  82,  83.     The  italics 
are  partly  mine. 

.  ,      1 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  203 

thought  or  talcing  the  power  of  thought  for  granted,  it  is  pos- 
sible to  give  a  perfectly  natural  history  of  the  ideas  and  of 
the  systems  of  ideas  which  any  one  person  will  entertain 
regarding  the  conduct  which  is  for  him  most  conducive  to 
life.  "  For  the  course  of  our  lives  is  by  no  means  our  own 
work,  but  the  product  of  two  factors — namely,  a  series  of 
circumstances  and  a  series  of  our  resolutions  which  continually 
cut  into  each  other  and  mutually  modify  each  other.  .  .  . 
It  is  just  the  same  in  life  as  in  a  game :  we  propose  to 
ourselves  a  plan ;  but  this  depends  upon  what  in  a  game  of 
cards  the  opponent,  or  in  actual  life  destiny,  may  please  to  do. 
The  modifications  which  our  plan  may  thus  have  to  undergo 
are  generally  so  great  that  it  can  hardly  again  be  recognised 
even  in  its  main  features."  ^  Schopenhauer  presupposes  rightly 
that  in  face  of  all  that  men  say  about  what  they  are  seeking 
they  are  always  seeking  more  life.  He  thinks,  to  be  sure, 
that  life  is  bad,  but  he  knows  that  men  always  seek  it.  There 
are,  then,  two  systems  of  tendencies  which  govern  man — the 
unconscious  tendencies,  which  he  cannot  resist  but  only  co- 
ordinate and  guide ;  and  the  conscious  tendencies,  or  the 
motives  to  which  the  system  of  ideas  that  has  formed  itself  in 
the  mind  subjects  him.  It  is  a  fact  that  over  life  as  a  whole 
these  two  systems  of  tendencies  balance  each  other,  and  that 
men  think  at  the  end  of  their  lives  that  they  have  at  once 
acted  out  their  nature  and  yet  acted  freely.  It  is  impossible 
here  to  show  psychologically  how  there  is  no  real  and  ulti- 
mate conflict  between  the  unconscious  tendencies  and  the 
conscious  actions  of  man.  It  is  implied  and  asserted  by 
Schopenhauer  that  the  conscious  actions  of  man  serve  only 
to  make  him  aware,  and  this  only  to  a  certain  extent,  of  the 
necessities  of  his  nature,  of  his  whole  nature  (including  the 
highest  developments  of  thought  as  well  as  the  highest  devel- 
opments of  instinct).     That  the  conscious  actions  of  man  only 

^  Parerga,  i. 


204  Schopenhauer's  system. 

serve  this  purpose  may  not  seem  to  have  been  proved ;  but 
in  what  has  been  previously  hinted  about  the  passive  nature 
of  reason,  about  its  merely  presenting  in  the  form  of  the 
concept  what  it  has  received  from  experience  or  perception, 
and  in  what  was  said  and  implied  about  experience  in  general 
being  experience  of  how  reality  afi'ects  us,  it  has  virtually 
been  shown  that  reason  cannot  and  does  not  make  us  con- 
scious of  anything  which  does  not  somehow  affect  our  life. 

If  higher  objects  than  the  gratification  and  the  perpetu- 
ation of  our  merely  iiatural  life  enter  somehow  into  our 
cognisance,  then  the  possibility  of  a  higher  life  is  of  course 
given  us  with  this,  but  still  only  the  possibility.  There  is, 
too,  in  reason  the  ideal  of  an  exhaustive  knowledge  of  the 
world  as  a  whole ;  but  such  knowledge  would  always  be  the 
knowledge  of  how  reality  eitlier  actually  aflects  us  or  could 
possibly  affect  us.  Hence  there  is  no  escape  from  Schopen- 
hauer's circle.  Knowledge  always  brings  us  back  to  the  will, 
and  the  will  is  "  not  now  beginning  and  not  now  likely  to 
end,"  as  Plato  said  of  the  Ideas,  and  we  nmst  act  in  the 
world  as  it  is  and  along  with  the  world-will  that  energises  in 
us.  We  shall  see  that  Schopenhauer  himself  comes  across 
some  cognitions  and  ideas,  the  Ideas  of  art  chiefly,  which, 
inconsistently  with  his  main  principle,  he  thinks  of  as  some- 
how non-utilitarian,  as  having  no  reference  to  the  will  or  to 
our  practical  nature ;  but  we  shall  find  that  even  these  cogni- 
tions or  ideas  can  be  analysed  into  life-furthering  intuitions 
or  feelings ;  and  so  we  shall  correct  his  casual  errors  (his 
theories  about  the  Ideas)  by  means  of  his  fundamental 
teaching  (his  philosophy  of  will). 

Something  of  a  clue  to  the  way  in  which  the  conscious 
actions  control  or  guide  the  unconscious  actions  of  man  is 
given  in  the  phenomenon  which  we  call  habit :  all  ideas  call 
forth  active  tendencies  or  movements, — Schopenhauer's  philo- 
sophy proclaims  this  fact  in  large  letters, — and  movements  or 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  205 

actions  once  executed  tend  to  repeat  themselves  when  their 
re-performance  is  tlie  line  of  least  resistance  to  the  develop- 
ment of  our  personality.  "  Although  first  principles  and 
abstract  knowledge  are  by  no  means  the  ultimate  source 
or  foundation  of  morality,  they  are  yet  indispensable  to  the 
normal  course  of  the  moral  life,  as  the  receptacle,  the  rdscr- 
voir  in  which  the  disposition  to  act,  which  is  the  source  of 
all  moral  conduct,  and  which  does  not  exactly  flow  out  into 
action  at  every  moment,  is  kept  stored  up  ready  to  flow 
through  certain  conducting  channels  (Ableitunffs-kandle),  when 
the  real  occasion  for  action  arrives."^  The  conducting  chan- 
nels of  which  Schopenhauer  here  speaks  suggest  the  tracts 
or  paths  in  the  brain  on  which  modern  psychology  insists. 
Action  for  man  is  a  resultant  of  the  conflict  of  the  various 
impulses  and  motives  whicli  exist  in  him,  and  inevitably  tends 
to  take  that  form  which  is  the  most  calculated,  whether  by 
nature  or  by  reason,  to  further  his  life.  Just  as  a  man 
knows  that  some  of  the  tendencies  to  action  wliich  now  exist 
in  him  are  the  result  of  conscious  or  intelligent  choice  on 
his  part,  so  he  must  regard  the  unconscious  tendencies  he 
finds  to  exist  in  himself  (whose  causes  of  course  go  back  to 
"  creation ")  as  the  result  of  the  choice  of  nature  regarding 
his  welfare  before  he  individually  came  into  being.  Con- 
scious actions  tend  to  become  unconscious  habits ;  and  the 
unconscious  tendencies  we  find  in  ourselves  must  be  regarded 
as  the  survivals  to  some  extent  of  past  conscious  actions  or 
past  conscious  choice. 

To  go  somewhat  more  deeply  into  this  same  matter,  it 
is  impossible  for  a  man  to  explain  his  actions  solely  from 
the  point  of  view  of  his  own  conscious  individual  self ;  he 
must  identify  himself  in  his  thought  with  the  whole  past 
of  the  human  race,  and  indeed  with  the  whole  system  of 
things.     As  this  must  represents  not  a  logical  necessity  but 

^  Grundlage  der  Moral,  Werke,  iv.  214,  215. 


206  SCHOPENHAUEIt's   SYSTEM. 

a  practical  necessity, — aomethinp,  to  wit,  that  man  must  do 
if  ho  desires  to  continue  to  exist  and  evolve, — the  ultimate 
explanation  of  the  world  for  man  is  n  j)ractical  one,  one  that 
is  to  be  found  in  will  or  process  rather  than  in  reason. 
There  is  thus  more  necessity  aboat  man  tiian  freedom.  In 
so  far  as  man  is  subjected  to  the  nature  of  things  he  is 
necessitated.  The  truth  of  the  world  for  man,  as  Schopen- 
hauer suggests,  is  will.  Now  the  intelloct  certainly  experi- 
ences a  feeling  of  consternation  on  learning  this.  It  would 
seem  as  if  the  intellect  had  not  really  much  to  do  with  the 
formation  of  motives  and  "  springs  "  cf  action.  The  intellect 
seems  to  have  been  given  to  man  to  make  him  aware  of 
diflerent  possible  ways  in  which  he  may  realise  himself  in 
life ;  and  yet  experience  teaches  that  the  possibilities  in  ques- 
tion are  not  so  unlimited  as  we  are  at  first  apt  to  take  them 
to  be.  The  life  of  man  seems  to  consist  in  being  gradually 
undeceived  about  the  possibilities  of  his  life.  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  reflects  this  feeling,  and  it  is  most  instructive  in 
so  doing.  It  is  the  discrepancy  between  the  ideas  that  we 
are  compelled  to  form  about  life — compelled  because  the  very 
growth  of  our  intelligence  means  our  forming  ideas — and 
the  facts  of  life,  which  is  the  theoretical  reason  for  Scho- 
penhauer's pessimism.  "  A  man  soon  accommodates  himself 
to  the  inevitable  —  to  something  that  must  be ;  and  if  he 
knows  that  nothing  can  liappen  except  of  necessity,  he  will 
see  that  things  cannot  be  other  than  t'uey  are,  and  that  even 
then  the  strangest  chances  in  the  world  are  just  as  much 
a  product  of  necessity  as  phenomena  which  obey  well-known 
rules  and  turn  out  exactly  in  accordance  with  expectation."  ^ 
Learning  about  life  is  to  a  great  extent  unlearning  many 
things, — recognising,  that  is,  the  nugatory  character  of  many 
ideas  which  we  frame  with  our  speculative  reason  about  life. 
But  how  is  it  that  we  are  able  to  frame  ideas  about  life 

^  Counsels  and  Maxims,  &c. :  Bailey  Saunders,  p.  121.       - 


THE   BONDAGE   OF    MAN.  207 

that  Imve  afterwards  to  Le  rejected  ?  If  the  reason  is  wholly 
Hubaervient  to  the  will,  as  Sciiopenhaucr  teaches  it  is,  how 
can  it  ever  form  unpractical  ideas  ?  How  is  it  that  man 
always,  or  at  least  for  half  of  his  life,  thinks  of  himself  as 
being  possibly  different  from  what  he  actually  is  ? — 

"  Qui  fit,  Miucenas,  ut  nemo  quam  sibi  sortem 
Sell  ratio  dcderit  hcu  fors  olt'  icorit  ilia 
ContentiiH  vivat,  laudet  divcrsa  sequentts?" 

It  cannot  be  said  that  this  is  fully  explained  by  Schopen- 
hauer, althougli  it  is  easy  to  answer  it  from  his  main  prin- 
ciples. The  reason  of  an  individual  man  may  or  may  not 
have  grasped  the  full  significance  of  life,  or  even  not  have 
understood  th'  best  means  to  select  to  the  furtherance  of  life, 
— may  not,  that  is,  have  fully  conforined  itself  to  the  leading 
of  the  will ;  but  that  is  natural  enougli,  as  man  has  been  made 
with  the  privilege  of  attaining  or  not  attaining  to  the  end  ot 
his  life  largely  witiiin  his  own  power.  It  takes  the  individual 
time  and  experience  to  grasp  the  meaning  of  things.  All  his 
conceptions  and  ideas  represent  tentative  efforts  on  his  part 
to  conform  his  reason  to  the  will,  and  in  the  end  it  will  be 
found  that  nothing  a  man  has  learned  about  life  by  way  of 
ideas  or  theories  is  of  any  significance  whatsoever  save  a? 
bearing  on  the  fact  of  his  development  in  accordance  with 
the  world -will.  The  ultimate  criterion  of  reason  must  be 
consistency  with  the  world  as  will ;  and  so  the  general 
principle  of  the  conformity  of  the  reason  to  the  will  is  not 
affected  by  the  fact  that  there  is  a  temporary  difficulty  on 
the  part  of  the  individual  in  making  this  adjustment.  Horace, 
who  knew  life  fairly  well,  goes  on  in  the  Satire  just  quoted 
to  unfold  many  examples  of  the  speculative  discontent  of 
men  with  their  lives,  and  traces  all  their  imaginings  about 
being  other  than  they  really  are  to  tlve  effort  they  are  un- 
consciously making  to  succeed  in  the  battle  of  life : — 
"  Nil  obstet  tibi,  dum  ne  sit  te  ditior  alter." 


208  Schopenhauer's  system. 

It  is  with  truth  that  Scliopenhauer  teaches  that  any  real 
spontaneity  that  man  has  is  to  be  found  in  his  will  and  not 
in  his  intellect.  "  I  must  here  take  occasion  to  remark  that 
what  I  understand  by  the  idea  of  spontaneity,  when  closely 
examined,  always  reduces  itself  to  some  assertion  of  the 
will,  with  which,  indeed,  it  is  synonymous.  The  only  differ- 
ence is  that  we  get  the  idea  of  spontaneity  from  external 
perception,  but  the  idea  of  an  assertion  of  the  will  from 
our  own  inward  consciousness."  ^  Of  course  this  means  only 
that  man  can  initiate  action  from  within  himself,  and  not 
that  man  can  act  in  any  way  conceivable ;  man,  indeed,  can 
act  as  he  chooses,  but  he  cannot  choose  "  anythhig " — only 
those  things  which  are  in  the  line  of  his  development.  Noth- 
ing seems  so  free  as  thought ;  a  man's  head  is  "  set  on  his 
shoulders  and  is  carried  by  his  body,"  and  his  thoughts  roam 
over  the  infinities  and  the  stars,  and  not  along  the  ground 
like  a  beast's ;  and  yet  they  only  tell  him  how  he  may  relate 
himself  to  all  other  organic  beings  and  all  other  persons, 
and  so  endlessly  develop  his  life.  The  intellect  works  spon- 
taneously in  the  sense  that  it  obeys  its  own  laws,  and  can 
make  any  object  or  any  aspect  of  existence  a  focus  for  its 
consideration  of  things,  but  yet  it  knows  things  and  persons 
only  in  so  far  as  they  affect  the  personality  or  the  will. 
Sensation,  for  example,  was  long  thought  of  as  possibly  telling 
us  about  the  qualities  of  things,  whereas  it  really  tells  us 
only  how  things  actually  or  possibly  affect  us.  Berkeley  saw 
this  in  his  own  way.  The  intellect  never  tells  us  about 
things  out  of  all  relation  to  our  will,  and  so  the  intellect  ought 
not  to  be  conceived  as  raised  above  the  will  and  so  capable 
of  dictating  ends  to  the  will  from  outside  it,  as  it  were, 
but  rather  as  only  discovering  means  by  which  the  will, 
which  is  the  total  self,  can  attain  to  its  end.  "  It  is  m  the 
service  of  the  will  of  an  individual  being  that  the  intellect 

'  Schop.,  C  d.  Willen  in  d.  Natur  ;  Pflanzeu- Physiologic. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  209 

has  been  called  forth  by  nature ;  it  is  only  calculated,  there- 
fore, to  know  things  in  so  far  as  they  awaken  motives  in  such 
a  being,  and  not  to  constitute  their  essence  [as  Hegel  thought  ?] 
or  to  apprehend  their  inmost  nature  [as  Kant  at  first  thought]. 
.  .  .  Accordingly  we  find  that  the  intellect  exists  only  to  serve 
the  will,  and  is  everywhere  just  adapted  to  this."  ^  Eeason- 
able  conduct,  Schopenhauer  always  reminds  us,  is  conduct 
guided  by  conceptions,  and  conceptions  when  real  are  founded 
on  the  necessity  in  things,  and  are  not  merely  the  arbitrary 
creations  of  our  intellect.  If  it  is  suggested  that  it  does 
not  matter  where  conceptions  come  from  or  how  they  are 
formed,  and  that  the  only  point  is  that  man  tries  to  guide 
himself  by  conceptions,  and  does  so  consciously,  and  that  in 
so  doing  alone  does  he  rise  above  the  necessity  of  nature  to 
a  voluntary  determining  of  himself,  it  must  be  confessed  that 
Schopenhauer  fails  to  recognise  this  as  the  real  issue. 

In  so  far  as  Schopenhauer  fails  to  give  a  complete  account 
of  man's  intellectual  freedom,  he  in  a  sense  fails  to  give  man 
any  freedom  at  all,  and  simply  teaches  that  man  acts  as  a 
natural  being — that  is,  as  he  is  made  to  be  and  determined  to 
be.  We  shall  see  this  later,  and  for  the  present  only  observe 
with  Schopenhauer  that  we  cannot  make  out  man  to  be  free 
merely  by  insisting  on  an  analysis  of  the  contents  of  his 
thoughts,  for  there  is  a  natural  history  of  the  formation  of  the 
thoughts,  and  consequently  of  the  motives,  that  determine  the 
action  of  every  individual.  "  Motives  do  not  determine  the 
character  of  man,  but  only  the  phenomena  of  his  character — 
that  is,  his  actions ;  the  outward  fashion  of  his  life,  not  its 
inner  meaning  and  content.  These  proceed  from  the  character, 
which  is  the  immediate  manifestation  of  the  will,  and  is  there- 
fore groundless.  That  one  man  is  bad  and  another  good  does 
not  depend  upon  motives  or  outward  influences,  such  as 
teaching  and  preaching,  and  is  in  this  sense  quite  inexplicable. 

'  Schop.,  Werke,  iii.  156. 
0 


210  Schopenhauer's  system. 

But  whether  a  bad  man  shows  his  badness  in  petty  acts  of 
injustice,  cowardly  tricks,  and  low  knavery  which  he  practises 
in  the  narrow  sphere  of  his  circumstances,  or  whether  as  a 
conqueror  he  oppresses  nations,  throws  a  world  into  lamenta- 
tion, and  sheds  the  blood  of  millions, — this  is  the  outward 
form  of  his  manifestation,  that  which  is  unessential  to  it,  and 
depends  on  the  circumstances  in  which  fate  has  placed  him, 
upon  his  surroundings,  upon  external  influences,  upon  motives  ; 
but  his  decision  upon  these  motives  can  never  be  explained 
from  them ;  it  proceeds  from  the  will  of  which  this  man  is  a 
manifestation.  .  .  .  The  manner  in  which  the  character 
discloses  its  qualities  is  quite  analogous  to  the  way  in  which 
those  of  every  material  body  in  unconscious  nature  are 
disclosed.  Water  still  remains  water  witli  its  intrinsic 
qualities,  whether  as  a  lake  it  reflects  its  banks,  or  leaps  in 
foam  from  the  clififs,  or,  artificially  confined,  spouts  in  a  long 
jet  into  the  air.  All  that  depends  upon  external  causes. 
So  will  every  human  character  under  all  circum- 
stances reveal  itself,  but  the  phenomena  which  proceed  from 
it  will  always  be  in  accordance  with  the  circumstances."  ^ 
Schopenhauer's  positive  teaching  is  thus  that  man  is  neces- 
sitated both  in  his  practical  and  in  his  theoretical  activity. 
Man  is  so  far  a  creature  merely,  and  not  free. 

It  has  already  been  suggested  that  Schopenhauer's  phil- 
osophy, except  in  one  particular  relation,^  makes  much  more 
of  the  helplessness  of  man's  thought  before  the  facts  of  the 
world  than  of  the  so-called  might  or  self-sufficiency  of  thought. 
This  was  partly  because  loyalty  to  his  own  generalisation  about 
will  and  to  the  facts  of  science  seemed  to  compel  him  to 
take  an  attitude  of  pronounced  antagonism  to  the  old  way 
of  looking  at  the  consciousness  of  man  as  somehow  elevated 
out  of  all   the  necessity  and  bondage  of    the    physical   and 

'  Welt  als  Wille,  i.  164,  165  ;  H.  and  K.,  i.  180. 
"  Cf.  chaps.  V.  aud  vi. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  211 

organic  world.  There  is,  of  course,  in  Schopenhauer  an  equiv- 
alent of  this  old  way  of  looking  at  things ;  and  we  shall 
consider  it  in  dealing  with  his  views  on  transcendental  or 
noumenal  ^  freedom.  He  reflects,  however,  all  the  astonish- 
ment the  ordinary  mind  seems  to  experience  on  being  made 
conscious  of  the  fact  that  the  human  personality  is  to  a  very 
large  extent  a  natural  creation — whatever  else  it  may  be — 
and  also  all  the  difficulties  which  the  philosophical  mind  en- 
counters in  thinking  out  a  freedom  that  is  consistent  with 
natural  or  physical  necessity.  He  saw  clearly  the  inevi- 
tableness  of  all  physiological  and  organic  and  reflex  actions, 
and  portrays,  in  his  futile  attempt  to  escape  from  the 
necessity  of  things,  all  the  consternation  the  mind  feels  in 
being  confronted,  as  he  puts  it,  with  a  thousand  and  one 
natural  needs  and  impulses  and  necessities  to  which  it  has 
been  led  to  think  itself  superior,  or  to  which  it  feels  itself 
superior  in  its  consciousness  of  ideal  things  like  truth  and 
goodness  and  beauty,  which  seem  to  have  no  equivalent  in 
the  mechanically  necessitated  world  of  physical  objects — in 
the  phantasmagoria  of  the  things  of  sense,  as  a  Platonist  or  a 
Berkeleyan  would  put  it.  This  is  what  is  meant  by  the  wo7'ld 
as  the  scene  of  a  confiict  hehvccn  the  will  and  the  idea,  because, 
as  Schopenhauer  is  a  subjective  idealist,  what  is  true  of  the 
self  is  true  of  the  world :  the  world  depends  on  the  self, 
according  to  him,  and  so  there  is  no  natural^  escape  from 
this  conflict  between  the  will  and  the  idea ;  that  is  to  say,  the 
world  throughout  exhibits  the  same  conflict  between  the  intel- 
lect and  the  will  that  is  apparent  in  the  life  of  the  individual 
man,  or  rather  it  is  simply  this  conflict  made  manifest  or 
objective  on  a  large  scale.  Eeason  can  deliver  us  neither 
from  the  natural  necessity  which  exists  in  ourselves  nor  from 

'  Cf.  chapa.  vii.  and  viii. 

-  Natural  because  tlie  escape  which  Schopenhauer  comes  to  hold  as  possible 
is,  as  it  were,  Bur'ernatural—  a  spiritual  mystery. 


212  Schopenhauer's  system. 

that  which  exists  in  the  world :  for  these  two  necessities  are 
at  bottom  the  same,  the  necessity  of  will,  from  which  the 
reason  can  by  no  effort  achieve  a  real  emancipation. 

The  whole  significance  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  in  this 
connection  lies  in  the  fact  that  it  represents  the  schooling  of 
the  intellect  into  a  proper  consciousness  of  its  real  function 
and  value  in  the  system  of  things.  Schopenhauer  is  always 
writing  about  the  "  consternation  of  intellect,"  on  being  "  con- 
fronted with  an  idea  "  which  it  "  did  not  will  "  ;  and  this  means 
only  that  he  had  inherited  from  philosophy  the  old  notion 
of  the  intellect  as  somehow  the  first  thing  in  man's  life,  assign- 
ing ends  to  his  practical  nature  and  even  to  his  speculative 
energy,  and  yet  felt  he  had  to  address  himself  to  the  hard 
task  of  reconciling  all  that  philosophy  had  taught  about  the 
world  being  undoubtedly  to  a  certain  extent  a  subjective 
world,  bound  up  with  a  knowing  mind,  with  the  indubitable 
teaching  of  evolutionary  science  and  of  history  that  man's 
intellect  discharges  only  the  function  of  enabling  him  better 
to  understand  his  natural  or  practical  life.  This  attempt  to 
unite  conflicting  views  was  sure  to  lead  to  a  certain  amount  of 
pessimism  and  illusionism,  for  the  highest  ideal  of  philosophy, 
from  the  time  of  Aristotle  and  the  Stoics  downwards,  had 
been  that  of  undisturbed  inward  self- consciousness,  just  as 
the  ideal  of  monastic  Christianity  had  been  the  passive 
virtues ;  and  now  came  modern  biology  with  its  demonstration 
of  the  fact  that  not  abstract  reflection  and  "  quiet "  "  inward  " 
"  insight "  was  the  essence  of  man,  but  impulse  and  action  and 
attainment,  however  strange  that  might  seem.  Man,  in  the 
eyes  of  Schopenhauer,  could  not  be  at  rest  with  himself  if 
he  had  to  obey  his  animal  nature  —  i.e.,  if  action  or  will 
constituted  his  essence  instead  of  thought;  a  conflict  seemed 
to  be  inevitable  and  eternal  between  thought,  whose  essence 
seemed  to  be  a  return  of  the  soul  backwards  upon  itself, 
and  volition  whose  essence  seemed  to  be  the  soul's  infinitely 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  213 

going  out  of  itself  in  organic  effort.  He  was  unable  to  re- 
concile these  two  things ;  he  could  not  bring  the  head  and 
the  heart  of  man  together;  he  thought  they  tended  to  get 
"  more  and  more  separated  from  eacli  other  as  life  went  on." 
The  life  of  the  individual  was  tlius  to  him  necessarily  a 
conflict  from  beginning  to  end,  there  being  by  nature  no 
accord  between  a  man's  thoughts  and  his  actions.  It  seemed 
in  the  first  place  to  take  a  long  time  to  work  out  even  an 
apparent  harmony  between  these  two  things ;  and  in  the 
second  place  there  would  still  be  to  Schopenhauer  an  eternal 
opposition  between  the  world  of  beauty  as  a  great  whole 
and  the  world  of  ordinary  actions  as  a  scene  of  conflict  and 
confusion. 

In  order  to  bring  out  Schopenhauer's  real  lesson,  it  is 
necessary  to  emphasise  what  he  thinks  of  as  the  bondage  of 
the  intellect  under  the  will.  He  could  not  allow  that  the 
individual  reason  is  in  itself  adequate  to  the  emancipation 
of  man  from  the  necessity  that  is  in  things.  Eeason  only 
makes  us  aware  of  the  necessary  connections  between  things 
and  between  our  thoughts  (which  are  in  the  first  instance 
a  kind  of  abridged  statement  of  reality).  In  action,  reason 
only  makes  us  aware  of  the  steps  we  must  take  to  the  real- 
isation of  certain  ends ;  many  ends,  of  course,  are  only  sub- 
ordinate ends ;  and  ultimate  ends  are  assigned  to  us,  not  by 
our  reason,  but  by  the  system  of  things  of  which  we  form 
a  part,  whether  we  call  that  nature  or  God. 

It  is  because  Schopenhauer,  in  agreement  with  all  past 
philosophy,  assumed  consciousness  to  be  primarily  intellectual 
or  contemplative,  that  he  could  not  but  regard  the  activity 
of  man's  nature  as  an  irruption  into  the  calm  and  quiet 
of  consciousness.  The  characteristic  of  his  philosophy  is  not 
that  it  exhibits  a  consistent  evolution  of  all  man's  activity, 
of  his  rational  and  self-conscious  activity  out  of  impulse  and 
instinct,  but  that  it  attempts  to  find  a  place  for  the  rational 


214  SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 

and  the  self-conscious  in  spite  of  the  existence  of  impulse  and 
instinct  and  passion.  This  very  attempt  of  course  discloses 
the  metaphysical  assumption  that  the  ultimate  explanation 
of  things  is  to  a  certain  extent  to  be  found  only  in  conscious- 
ness, in  our  knowledge  of  how  things  affect  us,  and  our 
inner  consciousness  of  our  own  destiny.  It  seems  difficult 
to  believe  that  there  is  any  other  real  reason  than  this  for 
Schopenhauer's  persistently  maintaining  that  the  first  thing 
or  the  only  positive  thing  in  consciousness  is  pain  and  not 
pleasure,  that   he  regarded  any  "content"   of  consciousness 

anything  that  came   into   consciousness — as    essentially   a 

disturbance  of  the  timeless  peace  of  the  Idea  or  the  con- 
sciousness that  thinks  itself.  Schopenhauer  is  a  niQta- 
physician  all  the  time  in  spite  of  himself;  he  saw — in  the 
language  so  dear  to  the  English  Hegelians — that  nature  is 
only  possible  through  the  existence  of  "  a  consciousness  that 
is  out  of  time  and  space."  It  is  the  irruption  into  this  con- 
sciousness {of  which  our  consciousness  was  to  him  naturally 

a  part a  part  which,  like  all  his  philosophic  brethren,  he 

could  not  always  in  his  thought  separate  from  the  whole) 
of  the  contingent  things  of  space  and  time,  and  of  the 
sporadic  and  spasmodic  experiences  of  life,  which  give  him 
all  his  intellectual  troubles  and  difficulties.  When  we  look 
at  thought,  it  seems  that  the  timeless  peace  of  pure  con- 
templation is  the  proper  spiritual  lieritage  of  man ;  and  yet 
when  we  look  at  what  he  is  subjected  to  by  the  various 
shocks  of  time  and  circumstance  and  the  thousand  necessi- 
ties of  life  and  the  thousand  griefs  of  living  among  such  a 
"servile  crowd"  as  the  majority  of  men  are,  we  are  led  to 
wonder  whether  man  can  really  hope  to  attain  anything  at 
all  in  this  present  life. 

III.  The  idea  that  pain  is  the  real  incentive  to  all  volition, 
is  primarily  an  expression  of  the  fact  on  which  Schopenhauer's 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  215 

whole  philosophy  rests,  that  man  has  to  do  certain  things,  Las 
to  will  certain  actions,  not  because  he  rationally  chooses  to  will 
them,  but  rather  because  he  must  will  them,  whether  he  in  the 
first  instance  rationally  chooses  to  do  so  or  not.  Instead  of 
being  born  to  do  things  because  they  please  us,  we  are  born  to 
find  our  pleasure  in  the  things  we  must  do.  The  end  of  life 
is  like  the  end  of  education  for  the  young,  according  to  Aris- 
totle, to  take  pleasure  in  the  right  things,  ol?  Su.  Schopen- 
hauer does  not  exactly  give  a  formal  approval  of  this  idea, 
but  he  simply  tears  away  our  thoughts  from  the  idea  that 
pleasure  has  any  conceivable  importance  whatsoever  in  our 
computation  of  the  value  of  life.  The  new  kind  of  posi- 
tivism that  he  sets  up  completely  overturns  both  ordinary 
hedonism  and  ordinary  speculative  dogmatism.  In  his  eyes 
man  is  not  made  either  to  understand  life  or  to  feel  any 
particular  kind  of  feeling  in  regard  to  it.  Man  has  to 
live,  whether  he  understands  life  or  not,  and  whether  he 
likes  life  or  not.  Of  course,  in  thinking  about  actions  and 
impulses  and  motives  as  somehow  an  irruption  into  con- 
sciousness, Schopenhauer,  be  it  repeated,  implies  that  man's 
consciousness  is  in  some  way  outside  the  play  of  his  natural 
life,  either  potentially  or  actually  outside  of  his  merely  natural 
life.  His  own  doctrine  of  will,  however,  is  the  best  refuta- 
tion of  this  very  error ;  for  if  it  implies  anything,  it  implies 
that  consciousness  is  a  consciousness  of  energy  or  of  the  real- 
isation of  the  self  through  energy.  The  first  "  awakeners  of 
the  mind,"  as  has  been  said,^  "  are  the  wants  of  the  body." 
Eeason  learns  its  own  utility,  its  own  function,  from  the 
very  irruption  into  it  of  numberless  desires  or  tendencies  to 
act.  "  By  nature  man  is  a  lotus-eater  until  hunger  makes  him 
a  Ulysses."  We  can  apologise,  therefore,  for  the  inadequate 
explanation  that  has  been  given  of  consciousness  or  of  con- 
scious actions  in  this  chapter  by  saying  that  Schopenhauer  has, 

^  Bonar,  '  Malthus  and  his  Work,'  bk.  i.  chap.  1. 


216  Schopenhauer's  system. 

on  the  surface  of  his  system,  no  theory  of  consciousness  at  all 
except  the  spectator  one,  and  that  he  did  not  try  to  relate  this 
idea  fully  to  the  Kantian  idea  of  consciousness  &z  somehow 
the  active  condition  of  all  experience.  Only  from  his  writings 
as  a  whole  can  one  find  some  indication  of  the  real  relation  of 
conscious  actions  to  unconscious  actions,  of  consciousness  to 
unconsciousness.  The  real  permanent  bondage  of  man  that 
Schopenhauer  points  out  is  a  bondage  or  yoke  which  the  way- 
ward or  ignorant  intellect  or  the  wayward  or  ignorant  will  has 
to  submit  to.  If  consciousness,  as  it  were,  imagined  itself  to 
be  a  complete  law  unto  itself,  it  is  undeceived  in  Schopenhauer. 
Life,  whatever  else  it  be,  is  in  the  first  instance  a  thwarting 
of  the  merely  individual  or  capricious  elements  in  human 
thought  and  action.  Such  thwarting  or  pain  is,  of  course,  a 
vis  medicatriv  naturcc,  an  indication  on  the  part  of  nature  of 
how  man  is  not  to  seek  his  happiness,  and  therefore  indirectly 
of  how  he  is  to  seek  the  same.  But  Schopenhauer  cannot  see 
that  it  is  such,  for  the  reason  that  in  his  philosophy  he  never 
gets  rid  of  the  prejudice  that  it  is  the  privilege  of  the  intellect 
or  consciousness  to  be  elevated  above  all  the  necessity  that 
holds  sway  in  the  world  of  phenomenal  things.  Now  the 
intellect  or  consciousness,  on  the  contrary,  must  simply  submit 
to  the  necessity  that  is  in  things. 

The  argument  that  life  contains  positively  more  pain  than 
pleasure  need  not  detain  us  long  here.  It  is  indeed  far  too 
general  and  far  too  one-sided  a  statement  to  be  taken  seriously. 
It  is  a  very  narrow  statement,  too,  because  we  cannot  estimate 
life  in  terms  of  feeling :  feeling  is  too  subjective  a  thing  to 
be  made  a  criterion  of  life ;  it  is  an  accompaniment  of  life, 
and  not  an  end  of  life,  as  Aristotle  said.  And  Schopenhauer 
himself  knows  this,  and  often  admits  it :  "  Whether  we  are  in 
a  pleasant  or  a  painful  state  depends  ultimately  upon  the  kind 
of  matter  that  pervades  and  engrosses  our  consciousness." 
Our  happiness,  in  other  words,   depends  upon  objective  con- 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  lilV 

siderations,  upon  what  we  arc  occupied  with  and  what  wu 
are  attaining  to.  Hence  feeling  is  not  of  itself  equal  to 
being  a  standard  whereby  we  can  measure  life ;  it  must  itself 
be  measured. 

It  is,  moreover,  hard  to  determine  the  causes  of  our  feelings, 
and  Schopenhauer  reminds  us  of  this:  "The  causes  of  our 
pain  as  of  our  joy  lie  for  the  most  part  not  in  the  actual 
present,  but  only  in  our  abstract  thoughts.  These  are  the 
things  that  often  seem  to  us  intolerable,  which  often  bring 
about  miseries  in  comparison  with  which  all  the  sufferings  of 
the  animal  world  are  a  very  small  affair.  Indeed  our  own 
physical  suffering  is  often  nothing  to  the  pain  of  our  thoughts, 
for  very  often  in  extreme  mental  suffering  we  afflict  ourselves 
physically  in  order  to  draw  our  attention  awi.y  from  our 
mental  suffering.  In  acute  mental  suffering,  for  example, 
people  tear  their  hair  out  and  strike  their  breasts,  lacerate 
their  countenances,  and  throw  themselves  on  the  ground, 
which  are  all  just  so  many  devices  for  taking  away  their 
attention  from  the  intolerable  pain  of  their  thoughts."  ^  We 
must  take  Schopenhauer  to  mean  what  he  here  says ;  and  the 
line  of  reflection  that  it  starts  is  characteristic  of  his  whole 
philosophy.  Despite  appearances,  he  is  really  far  beyond  the 
estimation  of  life  in  terms  of  mere  feeling.  As  in  life  itself,  so 
in  Schopenhauer's  account  of  it :  the  real  cause  of  pessimism 
is  a  general  sense  of  disenchantment  or  illusionism  in  life,  a 
discrepancy  between  the  expectations  we  form  about  our  life 
and  what  life  really  turns  out  to  be.  "  The  period  of  youth 
...  is  troubled  and  made  miserable  by  the  pursuit  of  hap- 
piness, as  though  there  were  no  doubt  that  it  can  be  met 
somewhere  in  life, — a  hope  that  always  ends  in  failure  and 
leads  to  discontent.  An  illusory  image  of  some  vague  future 
bliss — born  of  a  dream  and  shaped  by  fancy — floats  before 
our  eyes ;  and  we  search  for  the  reality  iu  vain.     So  it  is  that 

:::  »  Schop.,  Werke,  ii.  353. 


218  Schopenhauer's  system, 

the  young  man  is  generally  dissatisfied  with  the  position  in 
which  he  finds  himself,  whatever  it  may  be :  he  ascribes  his 
disappointment  solely  to  the  state  of  things  that  meets  him 
on  his  first  introduction  to  life,  when  he  had  expected  some- 
thing very  different ;  whereas  it  is  only  the  vanity  and  wretch- 
edness of  human  life  everywhere  that  he  is  now  for  the  first 
time  experiencing. 

"  It  would  be  a  great  advantage  to  a  young  man  if  his 
early  training  could  eradicate  the  idea  that  the  world  has 
a  great  deal  to  offer  him.  But  the  usual  result  of  educa- 
tion is  to  strengthen  this  delusion ;  and  our  first  ideas  of 
life  are  generally  taken  from  fiction  rather  than  from  fact."  ^ 

When  we  give  up  the  idea  that  we  are  entitled  to  form 
any  expectations  about  life  at  all,  we  give  up  many  of  the 
possible  causes  of  pessimism.  And  yet  it  is  those  who  are 
endowed  with  genius  and  nobility  of  nature  who  are  apt  to 
suffer  the  greatest  disappointment  in  life  because  they  are 
apt  to  think  that  other  men  are  as  elevated  in  thought  and 
feeling  as  they  are  themselves ;  whereas  most  men  generally 
turn  out  to  be  mere  slaves  to  the  will  to  live,  caring  for 
nothing  so  much  as  for  personal  advantage.  "  The  reason  of 
this  is  that  when  a  man  has  little  or  no  experience,  he  must 
judge  by  his  own  antecedent  notions,  and  in  matters  demand- 
ing judgment  an  antecedent  notion  is  never  on  the  same 
level  as  experience.  For,  with  the  commoner  sort  of  people, 
an  antecedent  notion  means  just  their  own  selfish  point 
of  view.  This  is  not  the  case  with  those  whose  mind 
and  character  are  above  the  ordinary,  for  it  is  precisely  in 
this  respect — their  unselfishness — that  they  differ  from  the 
rest  of  mankind ;  and  as  they  judge  other  people's  thoughts 
and  actions  by  their  own  high  standard,  the  result  does 
not    always   tally  with  their    calculation. -^v-^r   .    Five -sixths 

1  Schop.,  Werke,  v.  511 ;  Vom  Unterschied.  d.  Lebeusalter.    B.  Saunders,  Coun 
eels  and  Maxims,  &c.,  p.  131. 


THE   BONDAGE   OF    MAN.  219 

of  men  are  morally  and  intellectually  so  constituted  tliat  if 
circumstances  do  not  place  you  in  relation  with  them,  you 
had  better  get  out  of  their  way,  and  keep  as  far  as  possible 
from  having  anything  to  do  with  them."  ^  We  can  see  that 
the  assumption  upon  which  all  this  illusionism  and  disappoint- 
ment rests  is  the  idea  that  reason  exists  merely  to  think  itself 
in  all  its  own  potency  and  fulness.  To  say  the  very  least,  this 
is  not  an  idea  which  is  borne  out  by  an  examination  of  the 
purpose  that  reason  seems  to  serve  in  the  life  of  the  average 
man. 

Again,  the  idea  that  pain  outweighs  pleasure  is  wrong,  so 
far  as  the  teaching  of  biology  goes.  If  pain  really  outweighed 
pleasure,  life  would  come  to  an  end.  Consequently  the  idea 
that  pain  exceeds  pleasure  was  a  faulty  theory  even  of  Scho- 
penhauer's 'vn  life.  How  can  we  account  for  a  man's  thus 
forming  erroneous  estimates  of  his  own  life,  and  of  all  life  ? 
This  is  our  old  question  about  the  objective  value  of  any 
man's  intellectual  theories  or  beliefs  about  life,  and  about  the 
elements  that  enter  into  a  man's  so-called  "  free "  decisions 
concerning  anything."  Schopenhauer's  pessimism  is  a  serious 
thing,  because  founded  upon  the  idea  that  there  are  causes 
at  work  in  the  life  of  every  individual  which  tend  to  make 
Mm  form  erroneous  estimates  of  life.  "We  cannot  help 
forming  theories  and  reasons  about  our  lives.  Schopenhauer 
makes  us  feel  that  they  are,  all  of  them,  imperfect,  or  at  least 
inadequate  to  the  fact  of  life.  He  does  everything  he  can  to 
make  knowledge  seem  difficult  and  obscure  and  unworthy  of 
trust.  The  mere  idea  of  the  excess  of  pain  over  pleasure  is 
therefore  by  no  means  the  deepest  thing  in  Schopenhauer. 
It  is,  in  the  first  place,  an  illusion  arising  out  of  the  tendency 
we  have — Schopenhauer  has  it  himself — to  regard  inward 
contemplation  and  quiet  as  the  essence  of  consciousness,  in 

^  B.  Saunders,  Counsels  and  Maxims,  &c.,  p.  81. 

2  Cf.  pp.  2,  128,  163.  .       ►  ■       - 


220  Schopenhauer's  system. 

spite  of  the  fact  that  consciousness  is  actually  broken  into  at 
a  thousand  and  one  points  by  the  necessities  of  living.  It  is 
condemned,  too,  as  a  theory  of  life ;  because  all  mere  theories 
about  life  are  inadequate.  They  are  inadequate  as  proceeding 
from  the  intellect.  The  intellect,  in  point  of  fact,  denotes 
only  that  ?mount  of  consciousness  which  rises  above  the 
threshold,  as  it  were,  of  conscious  life,  and  does  not  directly 
speak  at  all  about  the  sub-conscious  depths  of  our  nature 
wherein  our  real  being  (the  will)  resides.  The  inmost 
recesses  of  the  self  are  dark  until  a  man  sees  his  course  of 
life,  looking  backwards  on  it  from  the  end.  Only  at  the  end 
of  life  does  a  man  know  what  his  nature  really  is.  "We 
only  know  ourselves  as  we  come  to  know  other  persons,  a 
posteriori,  through  experience."  ^  We  will  and  we  act  long 
before  we  know  why  we  do  so.  No  mere  theories  of  life,  ac- 
cording to  Schopenhauer,  are  theories  of  life  as  a  whole :  they 
could  not  be  that,  he  thinks :  they  are  at  best  only  the  im- 
perfect explanations  which  different  individuals  give  of  their 
different  lines  of  conduct — imperfect  because  individuals  know 
next  to  nothing  about  the  infinity  of  causes  which  pro- 
duce their  actions.  "  The  manner  in  which  we  act  on  the 
main  occasions  of  our  life,  at  its  chief  steps,  is  not  so  much 
the  outcome  of  clear  knowledge  of  what  is  right  as  of  an 
inward  impulse,  one  might  almost  say  instinct,  which  comes 
out  of  the  depths  of  our  nature.  And  then  afterwards  we 
feebly  try  to  paint  our  conduct  in  the  light  of  some  clear 
yet  meagre  and  acquired — nay,  borrowed — conceptions.  In 
this  we  may  easily  be  unjust  to  ourselves ;  and  indeed  it  is 
only  happy  old  age  which  is,  subjectively  and  objectively, 
equal  to  the  task  of  judging  in  the  matter."^ 

Thus,  although  Schopenhauer  says  that  pain  is  a  pheno- 
menon of  the  will,  consisting  in  the  fact  that  the  will  is 
hindered  or  crossed  in  its  action,  we  see  quite  well  that  for 

MVorld  as  Will,  Eng.  transl.,  i.  390.  'i  Schop,,  Parerga,  &c. 


THE    BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  221 

hiiu  the  deepest  pain  in  life  arises  from  the  sense  that  con- 
sciousness has  of  being  confronted  with  many  things  that  it 
"  did  not  itself  will,"  and  is  simply  forced  to  will,  as  it  were, 
without  having  rationally  chosen  to  do  so.  He  teaches  that 
"  pain  increases "  as  the  intellect  "  increases  "  or  "  gains  in 
clearness."  Men  suffer,  he  holds,  more  than  animals,  and 
highly  intelligent  men  suffer  more  than  less  intelligent  men. 
The  idea  that  the  man  of  genius  or  exalted  thought  and  feel- 
ing should  be  compelled  at  all  by  natural  necessity  is  excru- 
ciating to  Schopenhauer.  He  has,  we  see,  a  double  idea  of  the 
intellect :  first,  from  philosophy,  that  it  is  independent  of  the 
will ;  and  secondly,  from  biology,  that  it  is  the  slave  of  the 
will.  Consciousness  has  not  yet  been  explained  by  Schopen- 
hauer in  harmony  with  his  central  principle  of  will — it  has 
only  been  assumed  as  coexisting  with  or  standing  over  against 
will — and  we  have  been  led  into  an  illusionism  because  we 
have  been  unable  to  effect  a  compromise  between  the  view  of 
the  intellect  which  makes  it  the  spectator  of  the  will,  and  the 
view  which  makes  it  the  servant  of  the  will.  It  is  probably 
true  that  an  individual  in  the  course  of  his  life  tends  to  enter- 
tain both  of  these  views  of  the  matter  and  to  oscillate  between 
them ;  and  if  this  is  so,  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  expresses  a 
real  illusionism  which  is  a  natural  incident  of  human  life,  if 
not  essential  to  it.  There  lies  in  the  background  of  all  his 
thinking  the  idea  that  consciousness  is  free  from  the  ups 
and  downs  of  life,  from  the  eternal  process  of  things  and  the 
eternal  process  of  will.  Again  and  again  he  insists  that  the 
consciousness  of  "  internal  worth  outweighs  the  most  protracted 
pain,"  and  that  happiness  consists  more  in  "  what  we  are " 
than  in  "  what  we  have "  and  "  what  we  do."  There  is  a 
sense  in  which  this  is  right,  and  a  sense  in  which  it  is  wrong. 
Consciousness  cannot  be  content  merely  with  what  we  are ; 
so  much  is  clear  on  the  principles  of  Schopenhauer  himself, 
the  essence  of  life  being  attainment  or  volition.     Conscious- 


222  schopenhalcr's  system. 

ness  can  be  content  only  with  ever-evolving  and  at  the  same 
time  perfectly  self-conscious  life.  But  in  this  idea  we  are 
brought  face  to  face  with  Schopenhauer's  old  difficulty  about 
thought  and  action.  How  can  the  wayward  self — the  way- 
ward will  and  intellect  which  have  to  be  schooled  by  the  rude 
shocks  of  miscalculated  and  ignorant  effort  into  submission  to 
the  higher  or  rational  self  with  its  affirmation  only  of  the 
highest  kind  of  life  —  be  brought  into  true  subjection  to 
reason  ?  There  is  a  real  difficulty  here,  because,  of  course, 
the  self  is  "  one "  (whole,  that  is)  and  must  be  one.  The 
highest  form  of  intellect  (reason)  cannot,  as  we  have  partly 
seen,  be  completely  separated  from  the  sense-perception  that 
is  common  to  man  and  to  brutes.  Eeason  after  all  can  only 
furnish  us  with  ideas  that  have  come  from  perceptions.  Scho- 
penhauer says  that  the  intellect  is  like  a  flame  which  is 
"  tarnished  by  the  materials  it  arises  out  of  or  feeds  upon " 
(the  data  of  sense  perception,  to  wit).  It  cannot,  as  it  were, 
see  things  out  of  relation  to  the  development  of  the  self. 
This  all  makes  for  sliowing  that  the  mere  reason  of  man 
cannot  lift  him  out  of  and  above  the  plane  of  the  actual 
world.  The  ideal  that  reason  can  suggest  to  man  must  be 
drawn  from  the  actual  world  of  experience  and  history ;  all 
ideals  of  life,  in  fact,  have  been  constructed  out  of  the  elements 
of  man's  life  as  we  know  him — a  struggling,  evolving,  human 
being.  If  we  think  of  the  matter  we  shall  see  that  this  is 
sober  truth,  and  not  at  all  so  unsatisfactory  as  it  looks.  It  is 
only  the  people  who  imagine  that  reason  lifts  man  altogether 
above  the  world  of  common -sense  reality  who  need  to  be 
undeceived  by  Schopenhauer.  A  man  like  St  Paul  would 
probably  accept  en  bloc  Schopenhauer's  account  of  the  natural 
life  of  man.  St  Paul  knew  life  too  well  to  think  that  the 
mere  reason  of  man  can  avail  to  elevate  man  on  to  a  higher 
plane  of  thinking  and  doing.  So  did  Voltaire,  although  to  a 
great  extent  an  apostle  of  reason.     And  so  did  Eousseau,  who 


THE   BONDAGE   OF   MAN.  223 

entered  his  plea  for  natural  sentiment  and  feeling  in  an  age 
which  enthroned  reason  and  the  natural  man.  And  so  did 
nearly  all  the  French  and  English  moralists  and  most  of  the 
theological  moralists. 

IV.  Schopenhauer's  view  of  the  bondage  of  man  has  been 
treated  in  this  chapter  more  by  way  of  suggestion  than  by 
way  of  exhaustive  exposition.  Most  of  the  consequences  of  a 
practical  bondage  of  the  intellect  and  of  the  will  are  drawn 
out  at  length  in  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  life.  What  has 
been  said  may  help  the  reader  to  recognise  some  of  them  as 
that  philosophy  unfolds  itself.  That  the  reason  of  the  indi- 
vidual must  be  dethroned  from  its  imaginary  position  of  omni- 
potent survey,  is  the  lesson  we  have  learnt  at  this  stage ;  and 
we  must  not  be  deterred  from  accepting  to  the  full  the  truth 
of  what  he  teaches  by  any  anxiety  as  to  how  this  dethrone- 
ment of  the  reason  can  be  made  to  square  itself  with  the  sure 
hold  that  an  idealistic  plulosophy  undoubtedly  has  on  the 
world  of  ordinary  reality.  This  dethronement  of  reason  is, 
in  fact,  part  of  that  deliverance  from  prejudice  which  is  for 
Schopenhauer  the  best  fruit  of  experience.  "  The  chief  result 
gained  by  experience  of  life  is  clearness  of  vieiv.  This  is  wliat 
distinguishes  the  man  of  mature  age,  and  makes  the  world 
wear  such  a  different  aspect  from  that  which  it  presented  in 
his  youth  or  boyhood.  It  is  only  then  that  he  sees  things 
quite  plain,  and  takes  them  for  that  which  they  really  are ; 
while  in  earlier  years  he  saw  a  phantom-world,  put  together 
out  of  the  whims  and  crotchets  of  his  own  mind,  inherited 
prejudice,  and  strangv^  delusion :  the  real  world  was  hidden 
from  him,  or  the  vision  of  it  distorted.  The  first  thing  that, 
experience  finds  to  do  is  to  free  us  from  the  phantoms  of  the 
brain — those  false  notions  that  have  been  put  into  us  in 
youth."  ^  Of  course  what  seems  to  Schopenhauer  to  be  a 
'  B.  Saunders,  Counsels  and  Maxims,  &c.,  p.  134. 


224  Schopenhauer's  system. 

bondage  of  the  reason  and  the  will  of  the  individual  to  the 
pursuit  of  the  prosaic  wants  of  life  (which  can  all  be  summed 
up  under  the  idea  of  imagined  welfare  or  organic  development 
or  happiness),  may  not  seem  to  others  to  be  bondage  at  all. 
Our  author,  in  drawing  a  pessimistic  conclusion  from  his 
statement  of  the  facts  of  life,  may  seem  to  be  seeking  for 
better  bread  than  can  be  made  of  wheat.  Man  must  accept 
the  limitations  under  which  he  has  to  live.  Many  men  who 
write  from  the  standpoint  of  the  natural  sciences  accept  Scho- 
penhauer's description  of  life  with  but  few  reservations.  They 
pass  over  his  assertion  that  pain  outweighs  pleasure  as  simply 
false,  but  accept  his  idea  that  life  is  certainly  a  complete  illu- 
sion to  the  person  who  thinks  it  is  anything  for  him  as  an 
individual.  The  end  of  life,  they  say,  is  the  furtherance  of 
the  species,  and  "  Schopenhauer  is  perfectly  right  in  holding 
that  all  the  ideals  of  art  and  morality  and  religion  are  simply 
devices  invented  by  the  world -will  to  make  men  will  this 
altruistic  effort  of  endlessly  transmitting  life  to  others." 

There  is,  indeed,  much  that  is  illusory  in  the  struggle  of  life. 
There  is  the  ceaseless  struggle  between  the  will  and  the  intel- 
lect, the  effort  of  men  "  to  be  everything,"  in  face  of  the  fact 
that  they  can  "  be  only  one  thing  "  really  and  completely.  In 
childhood  we  know  nothing  about  life,  and  want,  as  it  were, 
the  moon  out  of  the  pail  of  water  in  which  it  is  reflected; 
our  youth  is  spent  in  being  undeceived  about  life ;  and  with 
old  age  the  possibility  of  living  has  passed  away.^  Schopen- 
hauer brings  out  the  large  element  of  truth  in  determinism. 
The  individual  is  free  only  to  act  out  his  proper  nature,  and 
one-half  of  the  vague  pursuit  in  his  life  is  nothing  in  itself. 
All  the  discoveries  (more  or  less  humiliating)  by  man  of  what 
his  proper  nature  really  is,  tend  to  show  the  questionable  char- 

*  Cf.  "  Measure  for  Measure  " — 

"  Thou  hast  nor  youth  uor  age, 
But,  as  it  were,  nii  nftor-diuiier's  sleei) 
Dreaming  on  both." 


THE   JONDAGE   OF   MAN.  225 

acter  of  the  assumption  of  what  may  in  general  terms  be  called 
rationalism,  the  idea  that  man  can  know  the  world  out  of  rela- 
tion to  his  will,  the  idea  that  reason  can  make  of  human 
nature  what  it  will. 

If  we  turn  to  history  we  shall  see  nothincr  there,  according 
to  Schopenhauer :  the  ideal,  he  would  say,  has  never  been 
attained  to  by  any  people  or  any  community.^  The  economic 
and  the  physiological  wants  of  life  seem  to  govern  history  just 
as  they  govern  the  lives  of  individuals  ;  "  peoples  "  strive  only 
to  obtain  a  position  of  vantage  in  the  struggle  for  existence,  and 
to  perpetuate  their  corporate  life ;  but  nature  cares  nothing  for 
"  peoples,"  just  as  she  cares  nothing  for  individuals.  Nowhere 
is  that  which  has  been  attained  to  as  a  matter  of  fact  just  that 

which  should  have  been  attained  to  as  a  matter  of  theory the 

production  of  an  ideal  society,  for  example,  or  of  a  life  that  is 
perfectly  at  rest  with  itself.     And  so  reading  Schopenhauer  is 
like  reading  a  history  of  disenchantment ;  it  is  reading  about 
how  much   life   promises  and  how  little  it  brings,  and   the 
narrative   seems   sufficiently  convincing   if   we   think   of   the 
slavery  of  the  lives  of  so  many  myriads  of  our  fellow-men. 
The  depressing  thing  about  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is, 
that  in  it  even  our  thinking  seems  to  be  determined  both  as 
to  its  form  and  as  to  its  content.     It  seems  settled  by  nature 
both   that   we  must  think   and   what  we  shall  or  what   we 
possibly  can  think.     And  it  is  true  that  thought  does  not  move 
merely  in  vacuo ;  we  often  imagine  that  it  does,  and  that  so  it 
is  free ;  but  it  does  not.     Thought  seems,  according  to  Schopen- 
hauer, to  be  destined  to  make  a  number  of  guesses  at  the  real 
truth  of  things,  while  only  some  of  these  guesses  will  turn  out 
to  be  of  real  value,  to  be  in  accordance  with  the  nature  of 
things.     We   may  think  out   for  ourselves   many  imaginary 
ends  of  conduct  and  many  imaginary  means  to  these  ends; 
but  nature   has  already  defined   what  the   ends   of  conduct 

'  See  chaps,  vii.  and  viii. 
P 


226  SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 

are,  and  indeed  what  the  best  means  to  these  ends  are  too. 
Any  conception  or  idea  is  a  thought -combination  of  many- 
elements  taken  from  the  real  world ;  as  such  it  may  he  the 
real  key  to  the  world  and  to  our  conduct,  but  it  also  may  not. 
Most  men  have  at  one  time  or  another  formed  erroneous  ideas 
about  life,  ideas  which  experience  has  caused  them  to  reject. 

It  is  indeed  excessively  difficult  to  see  just  what  man's  so- 
called  freedom  practically  amounts  to.  It  would  seem  that  a 
man  is  free  only  when  his  brain  is  in  a  normal  condition,  and 
when  it  presents  to  him  the  real  ends  and  motives  that  should 
govern  his  conduct.  And  indeed  freedom  is  largely  the 
understanding  of  one's  self  and  the  world  in  which  one  is 
placed.  Is  one,  then,  a  clock  or  a  mechanism,  and  would 
one  "  go  all  right "  perhaps  even  without  thought  or  conscious- 
ness ?  What  is  the  good,  in  short,  of  consciousness,  or  of  our 
idea  that  we  can  govern  ourselves  ?  It  is  doubtless  ab- 
stractly possible  that  man  might  have  been  "  wound  up  "  as 
a  machine  to  work  towards  a  certain  end.  This,  however,  is 
out  of  the  question,  for  the  simple  reason  that  man  has  been 
so  made  that  we  may  either  consciously  affirm  the  ideal  life  of 
the  universe  or  consciously  deny  it.  It  may  seem  foolish  to  be 
dissatisfied  with  the  life  of  sense  and  nature  merely  because  we 
have  the  misfortune  to  think.  But  it  is  even  so ;  we  must 
think  our  best  just  because  we  are  born  to  think.  One  thing 
that  is  not  adequately  recognised  by  Schopenhauer  is  that 
man's  thought  when  mature  is  always  slightly  m  advance  of 
his  conduct  and  impulses.  He  is  driven  from  behind  and  he 
looks  before  at  one  and  the  same  time.  The  Gods  gave  man 
Prometheus  and  Epimetheus,  and  these  are  twins.  The  mind 
can  always  seize  upon  anything  that  may  possibly  help  it  out 
of  its  bondage  to  the  individual  body  and  to  the  purely  per- 
sonal wish  or  will.     Of  this  again. 

But  the  main  contention  of  this  chapter  has  been  that 
nothing  will  appeal  to  man's  mind  which  does  not,  to  a  certain 


THE   BONDAGE   OF    MAN.  227 

extent,  promise  to  advance  his  life,  which  does  not  fall  under 
the  idea  of  the  "  good  for  man  " — suh  specie  honi.  The  "  good  ' 
is  what  seems  to  "  conform  to  the  will "  and  to  our  practical 
development.  But,  fortunately,  the  individual  has  not  been 
left  wholly  to  himself  in  his  struggle  to  escape  from  the  bon- 
dage of  the  merely  natural  life.  Nature  itself  and  history 
present  man  with  numberless  helps  to  his  "  transcending " 
his  merely  natural  life.  The  conceptions  and  the  visions 
that  appeal  to  him  out  of  the  past  make  up  the  ideal  wealth 
of  the  ages  and  of  the  world.  Can  man  appropriate  to 
himself  the  inheritance  that  has  come  down  to  him  in 
history  ?  The  answer  is  that  through  his  will  he  can  fasten 
his  attention  upon  these  things,  and  they  may  become  motives 
to  his  volition  and  development.  We  can  go  no  further  than 
this  here.  Man  is,  in  the  language  of  Schopenhauer,  "an 
eternally  old  and  an  eternally  new  assertion  of  the  will  to 
live  "  ;  he  is  partly  enslaved  and  partly  free.  Why  this  cycle 
of  individuals  and  of  groups  of  men  ?  Life  is,  in  a  sense,  a 
living  contradiction.  Man  "  partly  is  "  and  "  wholly  hopes  to 
be."  Is  he  entitled  to  hope,  however  ?  The  first  impression 
we  seem  to  get  from  Schopenhauer  seems  to  be  a  profound 
sense  of  the  bondage  and  the  futility  of  much  of  ordinary 
life,  and  of  the  feebleness  of  the  mere  individual  reason. 
The  individual  reason  seems  to  be  free  and  is  not  really 
so.  Is  there  not  something  of  illusion  in  this,  and  so  some- 
thing of  pessimism  ? 


.; 


228 


CHAPTER    V. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art. 

"It  is  connnonly  felt  tliat  pleasure  and  enjoyment  in  a  tlunf,'  can  arise 
only  when  it  conies  into  some  relation  to  our  will,  or,  as  we  prefer  to  say, 
when  it  serves  some  end  which  we  have  in  view.  If  this  were  so,  it  would 
seem  to  be  a  contradiction  to  talk  of  pleasure  which  did  not  involve 
bringing  the  will  into  play,  and  yet  it  is  quite  oljvious  that  we  derive 
pleasure  from  and  enjoyment  from  the  Beautiful  as  such,  quite  apart  from 
any  connection  it  may  have  with  our  personal  aims,  or,  in  other  words, 
with  our  will. 

"  This  problem  I  have  solved  in  the  following  way :  By  the  Beautiful, 
we  mean  the  essential  and  original  forms  of  animate  and  inanimate  Nature 
— in  Platonic  language,  the  Ideas ;  and  these  can  be  apprehended  only  by 
their  essential  correlate,  a  knowing  subject  free  from  will ;  in  other  words,  a 
pure  intelligence  without  purpose  or  ends  in  view."  ^ 

Schopenhauer's  pliilosopliy  i.s  a  web  or  texture  in  which 
hylozoism  or  naturalism  is  the  warp  and  idealism  or  Tlatonism 
is  the  woof.  We  cannot  contemplate  these  skeins  separately 
from  one  another  any  longer.  All  through  the  last  three 
chapters  the  higher  reason  and  the  higher  Ideas  and 
intuitions  of  the  mind  have  been  knocking  at  the  door  for 
entrance  and  recognition.^     We  kept  them  out  on  the  assump- 

'  Parerga,  &c.,  kap.  xix.  Werke,  vi.  447.  Bailey  Saunders,  Religion,  &c., 
p.  127. 

2  In  the  preceding  two  chapters  we  have  read  about  Schopenhauer's  treatment 
of  things  as  ideas  ;  we  are  now  (in  v.  and  vi. )  to  consider  his  philosophy  of  the 
Ideas.  To  Scliopeuhauer  the  world  is  will  on  the  one  side  and  idea  on  the  other. 
But  the  idea  side  is  a  plexus  of  the  Platonic  Idea  and  the  ideas  of  the  senses — 
ordinary  things — objects  (for  a  subject). 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  op  art.         229 

tion  that  truth  is  one,  and  that  whatever  else  we  might  at  a 
later  stage  see  to  be  true,  notliing  could  be  in  conflict  with 
the  fact  of  the  slavery  of  the  ordinary  understanding  and  the 
empirical  self  and  the  wayward  will.  Schopenhauer's  method, 
of  course,  in  this  regard  is  very  different  from  that  of  Hegel. 
Hegel  is  all  method,  while  Schopenhauer  cares  next  to  nothing 
about  method.  A  method  is  an  all-important  thing  to  Hegel, 
because  he  really  wished — naif  though  the  wish  seem  to  the 
anthropologist — to  subdue  everything  to  thought ;  it  was  quite 
an  unimportant  thing  to  Schopenhauer,  because  he  did  not 
look  upon  philosophy  as  an  effort  to  formulate  a  perfect 
logical  system,  and  because  he  felt  that  true  and  honest 
thought  could  not  wander  very  far  away  from  reality.  Hegel 
never  admitted  a  fact  into  his  exposition  until  he  had  pre- 
pared a  Procrustean  framework  of  dialectics  into  which  to 
receive  it;  Schopenhauer  never  concerned  himself  about  the 
possible  consistency  or  inconsistency  of  some  new  fact  with 
what  he  had  already  thought  out  systematically.  He  philo- 
sophised as  a  man  of  the  world,  knowing  that  just  as  the 
"  sun  "  shines  on  "  the  just  and  the  unjust "  the  actual  world 
is  full  of  contrasts,  and  we  must  take  things  as  they  happen 
to  come.  In  Hegel,  everything  is  forced  to  square  itself 
with  thought — the  direct  perceptions  of  our  senses  and  the 
deepest  feelings  and  intuitions  of  the  world's  greatest  poets 
and  prophets,  and  even  fact  itself,  as  has  just  been  suggested ; 
while  in  Schopenhauer  thought  has  to  square  itself  with 
reality,  the  concept  with  the  percept. 

We  know  the  awe  with  which  Kant  passed  from  the  study 
of  the  ordinary  understanding  and  its  prosaic  work  of  inter- 
preting reality,  to  the  study  of  the  soaring  reason  of  man  and 
the  realm  of  the  Ideas  proper.  There  is  nothing  of  that  in 
Schopenhauer.  He  hates  the  very  expression  pure  reason ; 
Vcrmmft,  he  reminds  us,  is  connected  with  vcrnehmen,  to 
perceive ;   and  so  in  the  higher  reaches   of  his  thought  he 


230  Schopenhauer's  system. 

simply  examines  the  intuitions  of  art  and  of  ethics  and  of 
religion  as  some  more  facts  and  perceptions  and  motive-forces 
with  wliich  the  philosopher  must  reckon.  Our  interest,  of 
course,  in  the  study  of  these  things  under  his  leadership  is  to 
see  whether  in  them  we  do  or  do  not  find  a  way  out  of 
the  bondage  and  the'  servility  of  ordinary  life  wherein  the 
imperious  claims  of  instinct  and  impulse  and  phenomenal 
necessity  assert  themselves.  And  indeed  we  may  state  our 
problem  in  this  chapter  either  subjectively  or  objectively : 
svhjedivdy  we  are  in  search  of  any  kind  of  knowledge  that 
will  free  us  from  the  practical  bondage  of  the  ordinary  under- 
standing and  reason  (and  indeed  we  must  get  that  somehow  if 
we  are  to  be  philosophers  at  all) ;  and  objectively,  we  have 
to  show  how  it  is  that  there  seems  to  be  contained  in  the 
higher  artistic  and  moral  intuitions  of  the  mind  a  knowledge 
or  view  of  things  so  different  from  the  ordinary  concepts  of 
the  understanding — from  the  facts  and  principles  of  common- 
sense  and  scientific  knowledge. 

Every  one  seems  to  realise  in  a  moment  that  there  is  a 
very  great  difference  between  the  ordinary  life  of  the  practical 
person  and  the  lives  of  such  men  as  have  been  considered 
by  the  world  to  be  great  geniuses,  eminently  wise  or  eminently 
good.  The  creations  of  the  wise  and  the  good  and  the  great 
hang  over  us  and  round  about  us  all  our  lives,  and  make 
us  ask  whether  the  life  we  are  actually  leading  is  worth  the 
effort  that  it  costs  to  sustain  it  and  to  transmit  it  to  our 
children.  In  a  perfectly  concrete  and  matter-of-fact  way  the 
question  of  questions  in  Schopenhauer  is :  Where  and  how  do 
the  creations  of  art  and  religion  come  into  our  ordinary  daily 
life  ?  He  himself  got  into  great  difficulty  because  he  found 
that  these  things  simply  did  not  come  into  life  at  all,  but 
seemed  to  take  the  mind  out  of  life,  away  from  it  and  beyond 
it;  and  to  exist  in  and  by  themselves — away  from  the 
phenomenal   world,  out   of  time   and   space,   in   an  absolute 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         231 

kind  of  way,  as  Platonic  Ideas ;  permanent  amid  the  flux  of 
things ;  in  things,  and  yet  far  more  than  merely  in  them ;  in 
the  nature  of  things  somehow.  The  permanence  and  the 
absolute  character  of  true  beauty  in  Schopenliauer  make  us 
despise  and  condemn  all  life.  "  Now,  further,  just  this, 
that  genius  in  working  consists  of  the  free  intellect — i.e.,  of 
the  intellect  emancipated  from  the  service  of  the  will — has 
as  a  consequence  that  its  productions  serve  no  useful  ends. 
The  work  of  genius  is  music,  or  philosophy,  or  paintings,  or 
poetry ;  it  is  nothing  to  use.  To  be  of  no  use  belongs  to  the 
character  of  works  of  genius ;  it  is  their  patent  of  nobility."  ^ 
Again,  "  for  the  purposes  of  ordinary  life  genius  is  about  as 
useful  as  a  telescope  in  a  theatre ; "  and  "  regarded  from  an 
aesthetic  standpoint  the  world  looks  like  a  cabinet  of  carica- 
tures, from  the  intellectual  a  house  of  fools,  and  from  the 
moral  a  tavern  of  rogues."^ 

It  is  well  known  that  there  is  something  in  Schopenhauer 
equivalent  to  the  contemplation  of  Aristotle,  or  to  the  ratio  of 
Spinoza,  or  to  the  wisdom  of  M.  Eenan,  or  to  the  cult%irc  of 
Matthew  Arnold,  or  to  the  righteousness  of  the  saint ;  and  that 
somehow  Schopenhauer  looks  to  the  intellect  for  deliverance 
from  the  bondage  of  the  will — not  to  the  intellect  which  is  in 
the  service  of  the  will  to  live,  but  to  the  intellect  which,  so 
far  from  being  sunk  in  the  study  of  mere  causes  and  effects 
and  of  practical  interests,  is  free  to  roam  over  the  world  of 
beauty  and  of  creative  genius  and  of  disinterested  goodness. 
The  notion  of  two  sorts  of  intellect,  the  one  wholly  in  the 
service  of  the  will  and  the  other  already  partly  emancipated 
from  the  will  and  destined  to  be  wholly  so,  is  puzzling,  especi- 
ally in  the  case  of  Schopenhauer,  who  knew  the  psychological 
error  of  splitting  up  the  mind  into  faculties,^  and  of  separating 

^  Schop.,  Werke,  iii.  444,  Vom  Genie  ;  H.  aiid  K.,  iii.  164.     The  italics  are  mine. 
"  Ibid.,  iv.  199  (Gruudlage  der  Moral).  J.  '  Cf.  chap.  iii.  p.  114. 


232  Schopenhauer's  system. 

even  the  mind  and  the  body.  The  emancipating  intellect 
in  Schopenhauer  is  the  antithesis  of  what  is  usually  de- 
scribed in  philosophy  as  the  discursive  understanding,  the 
act  of  arranging  our  knowledge  in  the  most  practical  and 
serviceable  way  for  the  purposes  of  the  will.  The  discursive 
intellect,  the  ordinary  understanding,  can  never  bring  us  the 
knowledge  of  which  we  are  in  search,  for  the  reason,  first,  that 
it  must  always  see  things  in  the  relation  of  end  and  means 
and  cause  and  effect,  the  causal  perception  being,  in  fact,  the 
essential  function  of  the  ordinary  understanding ;  and,  secondly, 
because  conceptions  are  at  best  an  indirect  way  of  knowing, 
and  are  themselves  nothing  but  abridged  perceptual  knowledge. 
The  idea  that  intellect  is  at  bottom  perception}^  and  that 
there  may  be  higher  perceptions  in  the  intellect  than  the 
perceptions  of  sense,  helps  us  to  find  the  intellectual  know- 
ledge of  which  we  are  in  search,  the  intellectual  knowledge 
which  is  to  free  us  from  the  bondage  of  the  will.  It  does,  as 
a  matter  of  fact,  far  more  than  this, — so  much  more  that  we 
shall  be  able,  at  the  close  of  this  chapter,  to  suggest  an  ex- 
panded meaning  which  may  be  given  to  Schopenhauer's  central 
principle  of  will,  a  meaning  that  will  strip  it  of  its  merely 
physiological  or  materialistic  character  and  bring  it  into 
harmony  with  the  reality  of  our  highest  aspirations  and 
spiritual  possessions.  It  was  of  ordinary  perceptions  and 
ordinary  scientific  knowledge  that  we  were  treating  in  the 
last  chapter.  We  there  saw  that  the  mind  was  subjected 
to  things,  to  the  necessity  of  things.  If  we  wish  to  stop  at 
this  point  and  insist  that  we  are  very  well  satisfied  with  this 
relation  of  ourselves  to  reality  through  our  will,  for  which 
Schopenhauer's  philosophy  seems  to  contend,  and  that  we 
do  not  at  all  feel  the  working  out  of  our  various  possible 
relations  to  reality  to  be  the  misery  that  Schopenhauer  makes 
it  out  to  be,  Schopenhauer  bids  us  reflect  upon  the  inade- 
^  Cf.  chap.  iii.  passim,  and  p.  167. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         233 

quacy  of  the  reasons  for  our  contentment.  If  Schopenhauer 
will  live  for  no  other  reason,  he  will  live  for  the  reason  that 
he  so  forcibly  exhibits  in  liis  philosopliy  the  unwillingness,  the 
simple  unwillingness  of  the  human  mind  to  rest  content  with 
mere  utilitarianism  or  mere  materialism  or  mere  naturalism  in 
any  of  its  forms  as  a  final  philosophy  of  human  life.  We 
did  not  find  in  the  last  chapter  an  adequate  recognition  of 
the  intellect  or  the  consciousness  of  man ;  and  it  may  be 
questioned  whether  mere  materialism  or  utilitarianism  or 
naturalism  ever  does  adequate  justice  to  the  possibilities  of 
the  human  intellect.  Schopenhauer  had  the  courage  to  act 
upon  the  assumption  that  a  merely  naturalistic  account  of 
man's  life  is  incomplete,  because  essentially  unsatisfactory  to 
his  higher  consciousness.  He  had  this  courage  simply  be- 
cause he  felt  the  presence  in  the  human  mind,  not  of  higher 
conceptions  or  notions — because  all  conceptions  come  from 
ordinary  perceptions — but  of  higher  perceptions  (or  intuitions) 
which  he  held  were  so  real  as  to  make  the  whole  of  the  rest 
of  life  seem  illusory.  Of  course,  too,  Schopenhauer  was  un- 
able to  accept  any  mere  philosophy  of  relativity  as  a  final 
philosophy.  This  meant  that  he  did  not  believe  that  science 
could  ever  present  us  with  a  complete  philosophy  of  things ; 
science  seeks  only  the  "  next  cause  "  of  an  event,  not  the  ulti- 
mate cause,  merely  what  is  relative,  never  what  is  absolute. 
If  philosophy  is  not  to  seek  the  highest  reality,  why  does 
philosophy  exist  ?  he  practically  asks.  And  we  cannot  leave 
his  own  philosophy  without  showing  the  reading  that  it  is 
prepared  to  give  of  the  reality  of  the  highest  things  in  the 
world,  of  the  alleged  "  noumenal  "  or  "  transcendent "  realities. 
Our  main  effort  will  be  to  bring  what  he  teaches  about  art 
and  religion  and  ethics  into  harmony  with  the  main  positive 
principles  of  his  system. 

One  cannot  forbear  the  reflection  at  this  point  that  it  is  a 
very  strange  thing  for  a  philosopher  to  be  strivmg  to  think 


234  Schopenhauer's  system. 

out  a  scheme  of  intellectual  and  moral  salvation,  as  if  phil- 
osophy had  anything  to  do  but  to  state  the  actual,  to  state 
what  the  real  world  is.  Schopenhauer  himself,  in  fact,  pro- 
fessed that  this  is  the  only  duty  of  philosophy.  He  taught 
that  the  only  business  of  philosophy  is  to  give  a  reading  of 
the  world  as  it  actually  is,  leaving  it  to  people  to  like  or  to 
dislike  the  trnth,  according  to  the  state  of  their  mental  culti- 
vation. By  way  of  answer  to  this  reflection  it  may  be  said 
that  in  our  artistic  consciousness  of  things  and  in  the  religious 
life  we  are  presented  with  definite  psychological  fact,  fact 
which  is  just  as  much  fact  as  our  scientific  consciousness  of 
things ;  and  that  philosophy  as  systematised  knowledge  must 
seek  to  effect  a  reconciliation  between  the  seeming  freedom 
and  exuberance  of  artistic  insight  and  the  loftiness  of  religious 
contemplation,  and  the  manifest  necessity  and  mathematical 
precision  and  prosaic  reality  of  mere  scientific  knowledge. 
And  Schopenhauer  recognises  this.  He  practically  saw  that 
there  were  in  the  human  mind  only  two  broadly  contrasted 
kinds  of  knowledge — artistic  knowledge  and  scientific  know- 
ledge. "  Wcr  K%inst  nnd  Wissenschaft  hesitzt,  der  hat  Religion." 
Our  experience  must  be  made  to  "  round  itself  off,"  either  by 
art  and  science  together,  or  by  true  action  and  true  religion. 
Schopenhauer's  problem  is  the  thoroughly  modern  one  of 
finding  in  the  physical  order  of  things  a  thinkable  basis  for 
all  the  higher  or  apparently  non-utilitarian  intuitions  of  the 
mind. 

To  recapitulate  somewhat,  it  may  be  said  that  for  Schopen- 
hauer the  kind  of  knowledge  which  will  free  us  from  the 
theoretical  and  practical  bondage  of  man's  ordinary  life  is 
neither  understanding  nor  reason,  whether  we  think  of  the 
reason  of  the  formal  logician  (which  is  the  only  reason 
that  Schopenhauer,  will  recognise  and  allow  for)  or  of  the 
reason   of  the   transcendentalists  (which  to  Schopenhauer  is 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         235 

a  mere  JlaUia  vocis,  a  mere  sound  signifying  nothing).  To 
Schopenhauer  as  to  Plato,  when  we  know  the  Ideas  we  do 
not  phenomenalise  them,  because  the  knowledge  we  have  of 
the  Ideas  in  pure  art  or  in  pure  contemplation  is,  according 
to  them,  "  pure  cloudless  knowledge,"  knowledge  not  ruled  by 
"  the  principles  of  individuation  in  space  or  time,"  nor  by  the 
"  principles  of  subject  and  object,"  nor  by  the  "  principles  of 
cause  and  effect."  In  artistic  and  contemplative  knowledge, 
according  to  Schopenhauer,  we  see  the  Ideas,  which  are  "  the 
immediate  objectivity  of  the  will,"  and  therefore  the  highest 
reality,  the  thing  in  itself  of  the  world,  and  we  ourselves  at 
the  same  time  become  "  pure  subjects  of  knowledge,"  in  which 
the  "  distinction  of  the  subject  and  object  vanishes."  Art, 
he  maintains,  affords  us  the  most  real  knowledge  of  things ; 
in  the  artistic  view  of  an  object  we  seem  to  see  it  no  longer 
as  an  individual  thing,  but  as  a  copy  or  "realisation  of  an 
Idea,"  a  pre-existent  idea,  one  of  the  archetypal  Ideas  on 
which  existence  is  designed — as  Plato  or  Butler  would  say,  or 
which,  as  Schopenhauer  (who  scorns  theism)  puts  it,  set  forth 
the  "  inward  "  meaning  of  the  world,  which,  in  short,  reveal 
the  modes  or  ways  in  which  the  world-will  energises.  He 
sets  forth  his  meaning  by  referring  to  and  quoting  many  of 
the  analogies  and  similes  of  Plato,  wherein  the  Ideas,  the 
real  archetypes  or  original  forms  of  things,  are  said  to  have 
"  neither  multiplicity  nor  coming  into  being  nor  passing  out  of 
being."  He  holds  that  the  knowledge  we  have  of  these  Ideas 
is  "  transcendental  knowledge,"  knowledge  which,  if  "  only 
powerful  enough,"  could  free  us  from  the  view  of  things  as 
related  to  our  will  and  the  feeling  that  we  ourselves  have 
of  being  necessitated  like  all  other  beings  in  the  chain  of 
natural  sequence  and  process. 

I.  The  Platonic  Ideas,^  we  saw,  represented  to  Schopenhauer 

'  See  above,  "  Schopenhauer  and  Idealism,"  towards  the  close. 


236  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  various  grades  of  the  objectification  of  the  will,  and  were 
said  to  be  related  to  the  individuals  composing  the  group  or 
species,  as  archetypes  to  their  copies.  The  Platonic  Idea,  he 
insists,  does  not  itself  "  come  under  the  Principle  of  Sufficient 
Reason,"  and  has  therefore  neither  "multiplicity  nor  change, 
genesis  nor  destruction  " ;  it  is  also  free  from  the  distinction 
between  self  and  non-self,  which  last  distinction,  according  to 
him,  is  simply  the  general  principle  of  all  ordinary  knowledge 
— the  idea  that  things  should  become  objects  for  a  subject.  In 
ordinary  perceptual  knowledge  we  always  see  things  as  distinct 
from  ourselves,  as  if  they  were  objects  in  a  world  outside  of 
ourselves ;  but  in  looking  upon  beauty  or  beautiful  objects, 
we  seem  to  find  this  distinction  somehow  vanishing,  and  the 
beautiful  object  becomes  for  us  at  the  time  a  complete  expres- 
sion of  existence  in  general,  or  at  least  of  a  definite  "  grade  " 
of  existence.  This  all  sounds  fanciful  to  the  ordinary  mind, 
which  is  not  accustomed  to  the  procedure,  unfortunately  too 
prevalent  in  philosophy,  of  taking  away  all  ordinary  predicates 
and  adjectives  from  a  thing  out  of  a  desire  to  add  somehow 
to  its  reality.  It  is  obvious,  no  doubt,  that  we  can  expect  no 
great  accuracy  of  thought  or  language  in  describing  a  process 
of  mind  or  knowledge  to  which  none  of  the  ordinary  prin- 
ciples of  knowledge  in  any  way  apply.  The  reader  of  Plato 
or  of  Winckelmann,  the  lover  of  art — especially  of  pictorial 
art  (for  it  is  contemplation  which  Schopenhauer  cares  most 
about  in  art)  —  the  student  of  philosophical  and  religious 
mysticism,  the  ascetic :  all  of  these  have  a  vague  intuitive  con- 
sciousness of  what  Schopenhauer  is  trying  to  express  in  philo- 
sophical language.  It  is  true  that  a  sense  for  beauty  and  the 
world  of  beautiful  objects  is  the  first  thing  in  art ;  and  it  does 
seem  that  without  this  sense  all  characterisation  and  descrip- 
tion of  artistic  objects  would  indeed  be  negative.  Spinoza's 
omnis  determinatio  est  negatio  is  to  Schopenhauer  certainly 
true  of  artistic  objects ;  scientific  and  ordinary  phraseology  do 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  237 

not  enable  us  to  describe  them ;  they  are  apprehended  by  the 
appropriate  sort  of  intuition  for  which  neither  the  most  ex- 
cellent understanding  nor  the  most  uncommon  degree  of 
acuteness  nor  the  strongest  logical  faculty  can  possibly  be  a 
substitute.  Every  one  who  has  a  true  feeling  for  art  has  felt 
in  himself  the  presence  of  intuitions  which,  with  Winckelmann 
and  many  others,  he  finds  it  hard  to  describe.  Just  as  the 
pure  mind  has  moral  intuitions  which  the  world  fails  to 
understand  and  appreciate,  and  just  as  the  mystic  has  in- 
tuitions of  deity  and  of  the  oneness  in  things  which  can  only 
be  mystically  apprehended,  so  the  artistic  mind  has  intuitions 
which  have  to  be  felt  before  they  can  be  described.  There  is 
a  "  taking  off  the  shoes  from  the  feet,"  and  there  is  a  taking 
off  the  ordinary  shackles  of  the  understanding  and  of  the 
principles  of  the  mere  reason  on  the  threshold  of  the  beautiful, 
which  makes  us  feel  that  beauty  will  require  a  language  and 
a  thought  of  its  own,  differing  largely  from  that  of  the  market- 
place or  of  the  laboratory.  Schelling,  like  Schopenhauer,  uses 
the  word  ideas  to  express  the  various  unities  of  the  imivcrsal 
and  the  x>articular  which  we  see  when  we  contemplate  natural 
beauty  or  artistic  beauty. 

"  Let  us  consider  this  with  the  help  of  examples  taken 
from  the  most  insignificant  things,  and  also  from  the  greatest. 
When  the  clouds  move,  the  figures  which  they  form  are 
not  essential,  but  indifferent  to  them  ;  but  that  as  elastic 
vapour,  they  are  pressed  together,  or  that  masses  come, 
drifted  along,  spread  out,  or  torn  asunder  by  the  force  of  the 
wind :  this  is  their  nature,  the  essence  of  the  forces  which 
objectify  themselves  in  them,  the  Idea ;  their  actual  forms  are 
only  for  the  individual  observer.  To  the  brook  that  flows 
over  stones,  the  eddies,  the  waves,  the  foam-flakes  which  it 
forms,  are  indifferent  and  unessential ;  but  that  it  follows  the 
attraction  of  gravity  and  behaves  as  inelastic,  perfectly  mobile, 
formless,  transparent  fluid :  this  is  its  nature ;  this,  if  hnonm 


238  Schopenhauer's  system. 

throufjh  piTccption,  is  its  Idea ;  these  nccitleiital  forms  are 
only  for  us  so  long  as  we  know  as  individuals.  The  ice  on 
the  window-pane  forms  itself  into  crystals  according  to  laws  of 
crystallisation,  wliich  reveal  the  essence  of  the  force  of  nature 
that  a})pears  here,  exhibit  the  Idea ;  but  the  trees  and  flowers 
which  it  traces  on  the  pane  are  unessential,  and  are  only  there 
for  us.  What  appears  in  the  clouds,  the  brook,  and  the  crystal 
is  the  weakest  echo  of  that  will  which  ajipears  more  fully  in 
the  plant,  more  fully  still  in  the  beasts,  and  most  fully  in 
man.  Hut  only  the  essential  of  all  those  grades  of  objectifi- 
cation  constitutes  the  Idea  ;  on  the  other  hand,  its  unfolding 
or  development,  because  broken  up  in  the  forms  of  the  Prin- 
ciple of  Sufliciont  Keason  into  a  multiplicity  of  many-sided 
phenomena,  is  unessential  to  the  Idea,  lies  merely  in  the  kind 
of  knowledge  that  belongs  to  the  individual,  and  has  reality 
only  for  this."  ^  It  is  this  that  the  student  of  natural  beauty 
must  see,  and  this  that  the  artist  must  catch  for  us  and 
cause  us  to  contemplate. 

"  The  same  thing  necessarily  holds  good  of  the  unfolding  of 
that  Idea  which  is  the  completest  objectivity  of  will.  The 
history  of  the  human  race,  the  throng  of  events,  the  change 
of  times,  the  multifarious  forms  of  human  life  in  different  lands 
and  countries,  all  this  is  only  the  accidental  form  of  the  mani- 
festation of  the  idea,  does  not  belong  to  the  Idea  itself,  in  which 
alone  lies  the  adequate  objectivity  of  the  will,  Imt  only  to  the 
phenomenon  which  appears  in  the  knowledge  of  the  individual, 
and  is  just  as  foreign,  inessential,  and  indifferent  to  the  idea 
itself  as  the  figures  which  they  assume  are  to  the  clouds,  the 
form  of  its  eddies  and  foam-Hakes  to  the  brook,  or  its  trees 
and  flowers  to  the  ice.  To  him  who  has  thoroughly  grasped 
this,  and  can  distinguish  between  the  Will  and  the  Idea,  the 
events  of  the  icorld  will  have  significance  only  so  far  as  they  arc 
the  letters  out  of  which  we  may  read  the  Idea  of  man,^  but  not 
1  World  as  Will,  H.  and  K.,  i.  235.  ^  Ibid.,  p.  236  ;  the  italics  are  mine. 


SCHOPENHAUEU's    rillLOSOPlIY   OF    ART.  2:39 

in  and  for  thomselvtiH."  It  is  thus  in  the  end  the  Idea  of  man 
tliat  the  painter  and  the  sculptor  must  apprehcnxl,  the  idea  of 
man's  life,  and  its  cadences  and  discords  and  harmonies,  tliat 
the  creative  artist  must  apprehend  ;  and  all  three  do  this  by 
a  sort  of  native  and  indefinable  intuition.  "  It  is  in  the  world 
tlie  same  as  in  the  dramas  of  Gozzi,  in  all  of  wliioli  the  same 
persons  appear,  with  like  intention,  and  witli  a  like  fate;  the 
motives  and  incidents  are  certainly  dillerent  in  each  piece,  but 
the  spirit  of  the  incidents  is  tlie  same.  The  actors  in  one  piece 
know  nothing  of  the  incidents  of  another,  althougli  they  jier- 
form  in  it  themselves ;  tlierefore  after  all  experience  of  former 
pieces,  I'antaloon  has  become  no  more  agile  or  generous,  Tar- 
taglia  no  mon;  conscientious,  I>righella  no  more  courageous, 
and  (Columbine  no  more  modest."  In  art,  in  short,  according 
to  our  author,  we  apprelicnd  the  inner  language  of  the  world 
and  of  man  ;  we  have  r.  sense  of  the  eternal  meaning  of 
tilings  and  of  the  eternal  sameness  of  human  life. 

Matter  as  such,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  "  cannot  ex- 
press "  the  Ideas,  because  it  is  "  through  and  through  nothing 
but  causality "  :  its  being  "  consists  in  its  causal  action." 
Causality,  he  goes  on  to  explain,  is  a  form  of  the  Principle  of 
Sufficient  Reason,  and  the  Ideas,  of  course,  in  his  eyes  can  never 
be  known  under  any  form  of  this  principle.  Matter,  in  short, 
and  the  perception  of  matter,  is  simply  an  objectification  and  a 
presentation  for  the  senses  of  the  workings  of  the  will  or  force 
that  constitutes  the  whole  of  nature.  As  has  been  said,' 
Schopenhauer  is  a  literal  follower  of  Kant  in  maintaining  that 
ordinary  sense-perception  is  impossible  without  the  exercise 
of  the  understanding  and  its  disposition  of  the  sensations  of 
tlie  dillerent  senses  into  an  objective  and  causal  order.  It  was 
partly,  then,  because  he,  as  a  Kantian,  hastily  thought  of 
causality  as  the  main  principle  of  the  understanding,  and 
partly  because  he  naturally  tended  to  think  of  matter  as  essen- 

*  Cf.  chap,  iii.,  the  beginning  and  elsewhere. 


240  Schopenhauer's  system. 

tially  consisting  of  will  or  force,  or  action  and  reaction,  that 
he  said  matter  was  simply  causality  or  causal  force  presented 
to  perception.  It  could  not,  therefore,  as  essentially  mechani- 
cal and  physical  in  its  constitution,  be  in  his  eyes  adequate  to 
the  expression  of  an  Idea.  He  forgot  altogether,  as  we  shall 
suggest  below,  that  this  is  just  the  very  crux  of  the  philosophy 
of  art,  and  indeed  of  philosophy  in  general,  how  the  Ideas  or 
the  "  universal "  element  in  things  can  be  made  to  tt.ke  on  a 
sensuous  or  material  setting.  In  matter,  he  thinks,  we  appre- 
hend the  one  individual  "Will  split  up  into  a  thousand  shapes 
and  forms  and  halt-formed  things,  which  we  take  to  be  essen- 
tially different  and  distinct  from  each  other,  acting  and  react- 
ing upon  each  other ;  and  this  mechanical  separateness  from 
each  other  of  the  different  portions  of  matter,  this  very  phy- 
sical action  and  reaction,  as  it  were,  prevents  matter  from 
adequately  representing  the  Ideas.  At  best  matter  may  be 
regarded  as  "  the  common  substratum  of  all  particular  pheno- 
mena of  the  Ideas,  and  consequently  a  connecting-link  between 
the  Ideas  and  the  phenomenon  or  particular  thing."  Matter, 
in  short,  as  matter,  cannot  express  any  Idea,  and  so  the  Ideas 
cannot  be  apprehended  as  things  at  all,  or  apprehended  by  any 
of  the  principles  of  the  ordinary  understanding,  which  loses 
itself  in  tracing  out  the  endless  causal  connections  among 
things. 

"  If  raised  by  the  power  of  the  mind,  a  man  relinquishes 
the  common  way  of  looking  at  things,  gives  up  tracing  under 
the  guidance  of  the  forms  of  the  Principle  of  SutFicient  Eeason 
their  relations  to  each  other,  the  final  goal  of  which  is  always 
a  relation  to  his  own  will ;  if  he  thus  ceases  to  consider  the 
where,  the  when,  the  why,  and  the  whither  of  things,  and 
looks  simply  and  wholly  at  the  lohat  ;  if,  further,  he  does  not 
allow  abstract  thought,  the  concepts  of  the  reason,  to  take 
possession  of  his  consciousness,  but,  instead  of  all  this,  gives 
the  whole  power   of   his   mind  to   perception,  sinks  himself 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  241 

entirely  in  this,  and  lets  his  whole  consciousness  be  filled  with 
the  quiet  contemplation  of  the  natural  object  actually  present, 
whether  a  landscape,  a  tree,  a  mountain,  a  building,  or  what- 
ever it  may  be ;  inasmuch  as  he  loses  himself  in  this  object 
(to  use  a  pregnant  German  idiom) — i.e.,  forgets  even  his 
individuality,  his  will,  and  only  continues  to  exist  as  the  pure 
subject,  the  clear  mirror  of  the  object,  so  that  it  is  as  if 
the  object  alone  were  there,  without  any  one  to  perceive  it, 
and  he  can  no  longer  separate  the  perceiver  from  the  percep- 
tion, but  both  have  become  one  because  his  whole  conscious- 
ness is  filled  and  occupied  with  one  single  sensuous  picture  ; — 
if  thus  the  object  has  to  such  an  extent  passed  out  of  all  re- 
lation to  something  outside  of  it,  and  the  subject  out  of  all 
relation  to  the  will,  then  that  which  is  so  known  is  no  longer 
the  particular  thing  as  such  ;  but  it  is  the  Idea,  the  eternal 
form,  the  immediate  objectivity  of  the  will  at  this  grade ;  and 
therefore  he  who  is  sunk  in  this  perception  is  no  longer 
individual,  for  in  such  perception  the  individual  has  lost  him- 
self ;  but  he  is  puro  will-less,  painless,  timeless,  subject  of  know- 
ledge. This,  which  in  itself  is  so  remarkable  (which  I  well 
know  confirms  tlie  saying  that  originated  with  Thomas  Paine, 
Du  suUimc  au  ridicule  il  n'y  a  qu'un  pas),  will  by  degrees 
become  clearer  and  less  surprising  from  what  follows.  It  was 
this  that  was  running  in  Spinoza's  mind  when  he  wrote : 
Mens  Kterna  est,  quatemis  res  sub  oiternitatis  S2ncie  concipit. 
In  such  contemplation  the  particular  thing  becomes  at  once 
the  idea  of  its  species,  and  the  perceiving  individual  becomes 
pure  subject  of  hnoioledge.  The  individual  as  such  knows  only 
particular  things ;  the  pure  subject  of  knowledge  knows  only 
Ideas."  ^ 

There  is  only  one  end  of  all  the  arts  for  Schopenhauer, 
the  representation  of  the  Ideas ;  and  their  only  difference 
lies    simply   in    "  the   different    grades   of   the   objectification 

1  H.  and  K.,  i.  231. 
Q 


242  Schopenhauer's  system. 

of  the  will  to  which  the  Ideas  that  are  to  be  represented 
belong."  Architecture,  for  example,  represents  —  if  we  set 
the  needs  of  shelter  and  other  practical  purposes  on  one 
side  —  the  aim  of  "bringing  to  greater  distinctness  some  of 
those  Ideas  which  are  the  lowest  grades  of  the  objectivity 
of  the  will,"  such  as  gravity,  cohesion,  rigidity,  hardness, 
those  "  universal  qualities  of  matter,  those  first,  simplest, 
most  inarticulate  manifestations  of  will — the  bass  notes  of 
nature ;  and  after  these  light,  which  is  in  many  respects 
their  opposite."  Even  at  these  low  grades  of  the  objec- 
tivity of  will  we  see,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  something 
of  the  discord  which  characterises  all  nature ;  for,  "  properly 
speaking,  the  conliict  between  gravity  and  rigidity  is  the  sole 
Oisthetic  material  of  architecture ;  its  problem  is  to  make  this 
conflict  appear  with  perfect  distinctness  in  a  multitude  of 
diflerent  ways."  It  solves  it  by  depriving  those  indestruct- 
ible forces  of  the  shortest  way  to  their  satisfaction,  by  taking 
them  round  to  it  by  a  circuitous  route,  so  that  the  conflict  is 
lengthened,  and  the  inexhaustible  efforts  of  both  forces  become 
visible  in  many  different  ways.  The  whole  mass  of  a  build- 
ing, if  left  to  its  original  tendency,  would  exhibit  a  mere 
heap  or  column,  bound  as  closely  as  possible  to  the  earth, 
to  which  gravity,  the  chief  form  in  which  the  will  appears 
here,  continually  presses,  while  rigidity,  which  is  also  an 
objectitication  of  the  will,  resists.  But  this  very  tendency, 
this  effort,  is  hindered  by  architecture  from  obtaining  direct 
satisfaction,  and  only  allowed  to  reach  it  indirectly  and  by 
roundabout  ways.  The  roof,  for  example,  can  press  the 
earth  only  through  columns,  the  arch  must  support  itself, 
and  can  sfvtisfy  its  tendency  towards  the  earth  only  through 
the  medium  of  the  pillars,  and  so  forth.  But  just  by  these 
enforced  digressions,  just  by  these  restrictions,  the  forces 
which  reside  in  the  crude  matter  of  stone  are  made  to 
unfold    themselves    in    the    most   distinct    and    multifarious 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         243 

ways ;  and  the  purely  aesthetic  aim  of  architecture  can  go 
no  further  than  this.  And  so  with  the  other  arts.  Land- 
scape-painting represents  "  the  rest  of  unconscious  nature " ; 
animal-painting  and  sculpture  reveal  a  still  higher  grade  of 
the  will,  where  the  will  shows  itself  in  a  "  free,  naUr,  and 
open  way  " ;  the  problem  of  historical  painting  is  to  "  express 
directly  and  for  perception  the  Idea  in  which  the  will  reaches 
the  highest  grades  of  its  objectification,"  human  character,  to 
wit,  and  human  beauty  and  grace ;  and,  lastly,  poetry  rises 
still  higher  in  representing  the  connected  series  of  the  efforts 
and  actions  of  man,  and  it  does  this  in  the  epic,  and  the 
drama,  and  the  tragedy,  and  so  on.  Music,  Schopenhauer 
says,  is  an  "  absolutely  unique  art,  more  incompreliensible  and 
indescribable  than  all  the  others."  "  It  stands  quite  alone, 
quite  cut  off  from  all  the  other  arts.  In  it  we  do  not 
recognise  the  copy  or  repetition  of  any  Idea  of  existence  in 
the  world.  Yet  it  is  such  a  great  and  exceedingly  noble 
art,  its  effect  on  the  inmost  nature  of  man  is  so  powerful, 
and  it  is  so  entirely  and  deeply  understood  by  him  in 
his  inmost  consciousness  as  a  perfectly  universal  language, 
the  distinctness  of  which  surpasses  even  that  of  the  per- 
ceptible world  itself,  that  we  certainly  have  more  to  look 
for  in  it  than  an  cxercitium  arithmcticcc  occidtum  nescientis  sc 
numerarc  animi,  which  Leibnitz  called  it."^ 

The  uniqueness  of  artistic  perceptions  and  aristic  objects 
to  Schopenhauer  consists  in  the  fact  that  they  separate  us 
completely  from  all  the  interests  of  the  will  and  of  our 
practical  nature  and  of  our  practical  life.  This  may  sound 
strange  after  the  arts  have  just  been  exhibited  as  expressing, 
all  of  them,  different  grades  of  the  will  to  live.  In  the  arts, 
Schopenhauer  would  say,  the  cosmic  will  has  come  upon 
something  which  makes  itself  out  to  be  in  a  state  of  inner 
contradiction.     In  the  arts  and  in  beauty  we  encounter  some- 

1  H.  and  K.,  i.  330. 


244  schopknhaukr's  system. 

thing  that  bids  us  be  still  and  contemplate  simply  the  v)hat  of 
the  world,  letting  go  our  hold  on  the  process  and  development 
in  the  world,  and  our  own  efl'orts  to  develop  our  lives  and 
to  attain  to  more  life.  In  the  contemplation  of  the  Ideas,  he 
holds,  we  are  no  longer  conscious  of  the  distinction  between 
the  attaining  and  the  attained,  between  the  subject  and  the 
object,  between  the  Will  and  the  Idea.  There  is  no  pursuit 
therein  of  the  ends  of  the  will,  and  consequently  no  frustra- 
tion of  the  will,  and  consequently  no  pain.  Feeling,  accord- 
ing to  Schopenhauer,  has  to  do  with  the  will,^  and  so  there  is 
neither  pleasure  nor  pain  in  artistic  contemplation — it  is 
"  disinterested,"  as  Kant  and  many  others  have  said.  "  It 
is  all  one  whether  the  setting  sun  is  seen  out  of  a  prison 
or  a  palace,  just  as  it  is  all  one  whether  the  eye  that  beholds 
it  is  the  eye  of  a  mighty  king  or  of  a  suftering  beggar."  As 
"  everything "  is  in  a  sense  beautiful  "  when  seen  in  its 
Idea,"  the  conception  of  beauty  is  thus  possible  for  every  one. 
Even  a  person  in  extreme  misery  is  relieved  by  the  sound 
of  a  melody  or  by  the  momentary  perception  of  something 
beautiful. 

This  doctrine  of  everything  being  in  a  sense  beautiful  may 
seem  to  conllict  with  the  notion  that  matter  as  such  cannot 
express  an  Idea.  The  truth  is,  however,  the  very  idea  or 
the  very  expression  "  matter  as  such  "  is  a  contradiction,  and 
Schopenhauer  knows  this  too,  although  if  he  had  remembered 
it  better  he  would  not  have  made  his  theory  of  beauty  so 
formal  and  so  abstract.  Beauty  is,  as  we  shall  see,  a  sort  of 
combination  of  sense  and  of  reason,  an  eternal  idea  in  a  sensuous 
medium,  such  as  colour  or  sound.  But  this  is  to  anticipate. 
"  Since  .  .  .  every  given  thing  may  be  observed  in  a  purely 
objective  manner,  and  apart  from  all  relations ;  and  since,  on 
the  other  hand,  the  will  manifests  itself  in  everything  at 
1  Cf.  pp.  220,  279,  and  elsewhere. 


SCHOrENHAUEU's   PHILOSOrHY    OF   ART.  245 

some  grade  of  its  objectivity,  so  that  everything  is  an  expres- 
sion of  an  Idea;  it  follows  that  everything  is  also  hcautifid. 
That  even  the  most  insignificant  things  admit  of  pure  objective 
and  will-less  contemplation,  and  thus  prove  that  they  are 
beautiful,  is  shown  by  what  was  said  above  in  this  reference 
about  the  Dutch  pictures  of  still  life.'"  One  remembers, 
indeed,  how  much  one  has  been  struck  by  Dutch  paintings  of 
mere  interiors  of  houses,  or  fruit,  vegetables,  and  dead  llesh, 
and  so  on.  It  is  just  because  beauty  is  in  a  sense  universal 
and  universally  perceptible,  that  Schopenhauer  finds  in  art  an 
escape  from  the  theoretical  and  practical  bondage  under  which 
we  live.  In  art  we  no  longer  know  the  world  as  a  panorama 
of  objects  as  common -sense  does,  or  as  a  plexus  of  forces, 
acting  and  reacting  on  each  other,  as  the  scientist  does ;  but 
as  unity  and  multiplicity,  as  the  one  and  the  many,  as  one 
theme  with  a  few  variations.  In  art,  too,  we  are  ourselves 
free ;  we  see  ourselves  as  we  really  are ;  we  realise  the  Idea 
of  man ;  we  become,  in  short,  that  Idea ;  we  become  a 
soul  or  potency  in  which  the  life  of  all  things  at  once 
beats  and  expresses  itself  and  is  at  rest.  "  Art  is  everywhere 
at  its  goal ;  science  never  is.  It  plucks  the  object  out  of 
the  stream  of  the  world's  course  and  has  it  isolated  before  it. 
And  this  particular  thing,  which  in  that  stream  was  a  small 
perishing  part,  becomes  to  art  the  representation  of  the  whole, 
an  equivalent  of  the  endless  multitude  in  time  and  space. 
It  therefore  pauses  at  this  particular  thing ;  the  course  of 
time  stops ;  the  relations  vanish  for  it ;  only  the  essential, 
the  Idea,  is  its  object."  The  salvation  of  the  world  consists 
for  Schopenhauer  in  the  fact  that  we  can  see  the  Ideas.  But 
seeing  that  the  distinction  between  the  subject  and  the  object 
is  said  to  "  vanish  "  in  the  "  contemplation  of  the  Ideas,"  we 
may  say  that  Schopenhauer  makes  out  the  salvation  of  the 

1  H.  and  K.,  i.  271. 


246  SCHOPKNHAUEIl's   SYSTEM. 

world  to  consiat  iii  tlio  fact  tluit  the  will  can  contomplato 
itself  in  the  Ideas.'  SchojuMiliauor  stands  in  art  very  near 
where  many  philosophers  have  stood  in  regard  to  reason  or 
contemplation, — where  Aristotle,  for  example,  stood  in  the 
tenth  book  of  'The  Kthies '  or  the  twelfth  hook  of  'The 
Metaphysics.'  To  speak  plainly,  Schopenhauer's  extravagant 
language  about  art  amounts  simply  to  this,  that  when  a  man 
sees  things  artistically  he  seems  to  understand  the  world  for 
the  first  time,  and  that  when  ho  undersiamh  the  world  he 
is,  figuratively  speaking,  at  rest.  Bnt  what  docs  the  rest 
that  is  in  the  contemplation  of  art  do  for  us  ?  We  have  not 
as  yet  got  to  the  last  word  upon  art  so  far  as  Schopenhauer 
is  concerned.      •  ,    ;     ,  i  '  ■  ' 

II.  In  view  of  the  fact  that  it  is  the  practical  value  of  art 
and  of  artistic  perception  that  most  interests  us  in  the  case  of 
Schopenhauer  (the  value  of  art  for  the  individual,  and  the 
value  of  artistic  perception  so  far  as  a  final  reading  of  the 
world  goes),  it  ought  to  be  at  once  mentioned  that  Schopen- 
hauer's whole  philosophy  of  art  is  bound  up  with  his  philo- 
sophy of  genius.  Genius  in  general  is  something  that,  in 
Schopenhauer's  eyes,  is  not  at  all  related  to  ordinary  life.  We 
remember  his  saying  that,  for  the  purposes  of  ordinary  life, 
genius  is  "  about  as  useful  as  a  telescope  in  a  theatre."  Now, 
genius  or  an  element  of  genius  has  been  thought  by  many  to 
be  the  only  thing  that  is  adequate  to  a  real  comprehension  or 
perc9ption  of  the  nature  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  Fine  art, 
in  fact,  has  been  said  to  be  the  art  of  genius.  Genius  has,  of 
course,  intuitions  of  truth  and  moral  perfection  as  well  as  of 
beauty.  Indeed  it  may  be  said  that,  as  the  world  is  one,  and 
as  life  is  one,  and  as  real  genius  cannot  see  things  broken  and 

*  We  could  make  out  Schopenhauer  to  hold  that  the  idea  can  contemplate 
itself  in  art,  and  so  miuimise  the  difference  between  Schopenhauer  and  Hegel, 
but  this  would  do  some  violence  to  the  nature  of  the  system. 


SCUOrENlIAUEU's    PHILOSOrHY    OF   AUT.  247 

by  linlvo8,  so  the  intuitionH  of  j^'onius  are  all  interwovon,  and 
tlu!  lilglicst  iirtisliV  intuitioiiH  cannot  hn  contenii)lat(!(l  apart 
from  tlio  lii;,'host  moral  nncl  intellectual  intuitions.  A  touch 
of  geniuH,  it  nuiy  be  said,  just  as  a  "  touch  of  nature,"  nuikes 
the  "  wholo  world  kin."  All  this  holds  good  iu  Schopen- 
hauer. And  his  philosophy  of  life  simply  is  that  a  man 
stumbles  on  in  life  making  mistakes  and  "  noble  errors  "  one 
after  another,  until  the  true  light  of  (esthetic  perception, 
of  genius,  lights  up  Ids  confused  striving,  and  the  confused 
striving  of  the  whole  world,  so  that  he  sees  himself  and  all 
things  "  whole  "  and  "  objectively,"  or  in  a  spirit  of  "  perfect 
objectivity."  The  greatest  helps  that  the  cosmos  affords  to 
man  in  Ids  partially  blind  ellbrt  to  understand  things  are 
practically,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  the  Ideas  of  art,  the 
collective  art  of  the  world,  the  visions  of  the  ideas  that  art 
has  and  holds  out  to  u.s.  .    ,  „   .  ,  7  •, 

Art  is  vision  to  Schopenhauer.  One  feels,  from  what  ho 
says,  that  the  way  in  which  art  came  home  to  him  was  in 
the  shape  of  a  vision.  I'ictures  and  sculpture  were  obviously 
the  first  things  that  affected  him  in  the  way  of  art,  although 
ho  later  came  to  feel  music  to  be  the  most  perfect  expression 
of  the  energising  of  the  world-will,  and  to  associate  art  with 
the  whole  philosophy  of  genius.  In  all  his  disquisitions, 
indeed,  upon  art  and  upon  genius,  he  does  not  seem  ever 
to  have  got  away  from  his  first  idea  of  art  as  a  vision  into 
the  world  of  things  and  the  life  of  men.  This  has  its  dis- 
advantages as  well  as  its  advantages ;  indeed  the  former 
perhaps  outweigh  the  latter  in  Schopenhauer's  case.  In  all 
his  thinking  and  all  his  feeling  and  all  his  acting,  he  seemed 
to  be  dominated  by  the  assumption  that  seeing  and  compre- 
hension is  one  thing,  and  doing  and  acting  quite  another. 
It  was  the  radical  defect  of  his  mind  and  his  life  to  be 
unable  to  correlate  seeing  and  doing,  and  this  in  spite  of 
the  fact  that  his  whole  system  is  based  upon  the  idea  that 


248  Schopenhauer's  system. 

knowledge  exists  simply  to  light  up  the  will.  Just  as  the 
idea  of  the  intellect  being  merely  a  light  to  the  will  was 
used  by  Schopenhauer  more  ad  an  after-thought  than  as  a 
main  principle,  so  his  whole  philosophy  of  art  and  of  genius 
was  also  largely  an  after-thought  for  him.  It  came  to  him 
after  he  had  perceived,  and  had  logically  convinced  himself 
of,  the  inevitable  bondage  of  man.  True,  it  was  almost 
the  capital  discovery  of  his  life,  the  thing  that  brought  him 
rest  in  his  own  life,  that  symbolised  his  moral  conversion, 
but  it  was  still  an  after-thought.  And  so  one  always  feels 
that  the  nature  of  art  is  never  stated  with  perfect  freedom 
and  naturalness  and  "  objectivity "  by  Schopenhauer.  For 
him,  art  is  not  a  beautiful  accompaniment  of  life,  not  the 
same  thing  that  it  was  for  the  schonc  Seelcn  of  whom  the 
German  literature  of  his  day  was  beginning  to  talk,  or  for 
those  who  are  children  of  grace  and  light  from  the  very 
beginning  of  their  lives,  as  the  Greeks  were,  or  as  a  man 
like  Goethe  was.  Life  had  always  seemed  a  good  deal  like 
a  glorious  pageant  to  Goethe,  but  not  so  to  Schopenhauer. 
Art  was  not  the  same  thing  to  him  that  it  is  for  a  per- 
fectly poetical  or  musical  or  creative  soul ;  artistic  feeling 
did  not  appeal  to  him  in  the  garb  of  the  play  or  the  form 
impulse  that  Schiller  found  to  be  so  large  an  element  in 
the  creation  of  the  beautiful.  He  was  not  dowered  to  know 
and  appreciate  beauty  as  was  Mozart  or  Robert  Burns  or 
Botticelli. 

In  saying  that  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art  cannot  be 
separated  from  his  philosophy  of  genius  in  general,  one  must 
realise  not  merely  that  his  account  of  artistic  perception  is 
very  unreal  save  when  associated  with  the  whole  realm  of 
sensuous  and  imaginative  and  intellectual  beauty,  but  that 
his  philosophy  of  art  sustains  the  same  errant  and  uncer- 
tain attitude  towards  reality  that  has  so  often  characterised 
the   lives   of    men   (Byron   and   Heine   and   Francois   Villon, 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         249 

for  example),  wlio,  because  they  could  not  connect  together, 
in  their  feeling  and  thought,  difl'erent  kinds  of  beauty  (moral, 
intellectual,  and  aesthetic),  were  led  into  a  revolt  against  life 
rather  than  a  sympathetic  and  sane  attitude  towards  it. 

"  The  troubled  life 
Of  genius,  seen  so  bright  when  working  forth 
Some  trusted  end,  seems  sad  when  all  in  vain " 

Schopenhauer  knew  what  beauty  was,  but  he  did  not 
appreciate  it  in  his  soul  as  Sophocles  did.  To  him  beauty 
was  only  a  "  light " — not  the  spontaneous  and  joyous  crea- 
tion of  a  full  sense  for  reality,  but  a  feeble  fair  flicker — the 
"  light "  and  the  "  steady  gaze "  on  the  "  face  of  genius,"  or 
the  "  gleam  of  rest  and  repose "  that  often  appears  on  the 
faces  of  those  who  die  after  extreme  suffering.  He  evidently 
came  at  the  end  of  his  life,  through  reflection  upon  poetry 
and  music  as  univ^ersal  arts,  to  appreciate  art  as  the  out- 
come of  a  healthy  and  refined  general  sense  for  things ;  but 
this  feeling  represented  a  summit  of  effort  towards  which 
he  had  struggled  during  the  course  of  his  life,  and  not  a 
level  of  attainment  from  which  he  could  always  calmly 
survey  the  realm  of  beauty.  Painting  and  sculpture  were 
the  arts  that  he  first  appreciated  and  really  always  most 
appreciated.  He  did  not,  however,  fully  understand  colour 
in  painting,  nor  painting  itself  as  an  outcome  of  the  modern 
romantic  sense  for  life,  a  sense  which  has  its  fullest  expression 
after  all  in  music.^     It  was  more  tlie  form  and  the  feeling 

^  Although  Schopenhauer  thought  music  to  be  the  highest  of  all  the  arts,  and 
the  supreme  expression  of  the  will  to  live,  he  by  no  means  approved  of  the  grand 
opera  or  of  the  "  liighly  complicated  "  character  of  opera  music,  or  of  its  thousand 
accessories.  Lights  and  shadows,  different  colours,  fable  and  superstition,  the 
hallet,  with  its  repetition  of  mere  melody,  elaborate  scenery — to  his  mind  all 
these  things  prevented  that  undivided  and  undisturbed  attention  which  should  be 
accorded  to  true  music.  Music,  indeed,  which  demanded  such  accessories  could 
not  be  true  music,  he  thought.  It  is  an  interesting  question  at  the  present  time 
liow  far  some  modern  operas  simply  represent,  as  Schopenhauer  says,  an  "un- 
musical invention  for  unmusical  spirits."  One  certainly  unflerstands  and  appre- 
ciates his  contention. 


250  Schopenhauer's  system. 

of  perfect  simplicity  or  repose  exemplified  in  the  few  master- 
pieces of  sculpture  and  the  early  classical  painting  of  modern 
Europe  that  he  worshipped.  It  is  true  that  his  idea  of  the 
different  arts,  as  representing  different  grades  of  the  will  to 
live,  introduced  some  degree  of  breadth  and  depth  into  his 
aesthetic  theory;  But  this  idea  was  probably  suggested  to 
him  by  the  fact  that  classical  architecture  seemed  to  be 
largely  the  simple  arrangement  of  longitudinal  blocks  of 
stone,  and  classical  sculpture  the  expression  of  the  perfect 
human  figure.  Take  it,  in  short,  where  one  will,  his  theory 
of  art  and  of  genius  has  all  the  defects  and  all  the  interest 
incident  to  the  fact  that  he  thought  of  beauty  chiefly  as  a 
mere  vision  or  spectacle  revealed  to  the  eye,  and  not  as  an 
articulate  system  or  world  of  ideal  forms  and  realities  in- 
vented and  created  by  the  constructive  activity  of  the  human 
soul  acting  in  accordance  with  the  laws  of  creative  production 
that  are  shadowed  forth  even  in  the  natural  world  (if  we 
can  conceive,  as  indeed  we  cannot,  of  the  natural  world 
apart  from  the  spiritualised  reality  which  it  is  destined 
to  sustain  and  support).  "  The  subject  of  willing  is  thus 
constantly  stretched  on  the  revolving  wheel  of  Ixion,  pours 
water  into  the  sieve  of  the  Danaids,  or  is  the  ever-longing 
Tantalus."  This  is  how  he  thinks  of  the  ordinary  effort  to 
live,  the  ordinary  struggle  for  life.  Then  in  the  next  line 
we  have  an  indication  of  the  sudden  irruption  —  a  most 
unaisthetic  and  unphilosophical  and  crude  way  of  thinking 
of  the  matter,  yet  perfectly  representative  of  our  author — 
of  the  blessed  vision  of  art  into  life.  "  But  when  some 
external^  cause  or  inward  disposition  lifts  us  suddenly  out  of 
the  endless  stream  of  willing,  delivers  knowledge  from  the 
slavery  of  the  will,  the  attention  is  no  longer  directed  to  the 
motives  of  willing,  but  comprehends  things  free  from  their 
relation  to  the  will,  and  thus  observes  them  without  personal 

1  Cf.  p.  254. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  251 

interest,  without  subjectivity,  purely  objectively,  gives  itself 
entirely  up  to  them  so  far  as  they  are  ideas,  and  not  in 
so  far  as  they  are  motives.  Then  all  at  once  the  power 
which  we  were  always  seeking,  but  which  always  fled  from 
us  on  the  former  path  of  the  desires,  comes  to  us  of  its  own 
accord,  and  it  is  well  with  us.  It  is  the  painless  state  which 
Epicurus  prized  as  the  highest  good  and  as  the  state  of  the 
gods ;  for  we  are  for  the  moment  set  free  from  the  miserable 
strivings  of  the  will;  we  keep  the  Sabbath  of  the  penal 
servitude  of  willing;    the  wheel  of  Ixion  stands  still." 

If  Schopenhauer  had  reinterpreted  his  whole  theory  of 
art  in  terms  of  music  or  of  poetry,  and  not  considered  so 
exclusively  the  media  of  colour  and  marble,  art  might  have 
become  for  him  an  accompaniment  of  all  life,  instead  of  a 
half-hearted  hope  or  a  fair  but  impossible  dream — a  mere 
consolatio.  '  s  it  is,  beauty  in  Schopenhauer  can  undoubtedly 
take  us  ou.  of  life  or  cause  us  to  pause  in  the  struggle  of 
life,  but  it  cannot  fully  enter  into  our  lives  as  a  pervading 
sense  for  reality  as  it  ought  to  do.  An  adequate  subjective 
appreciation  of  beauty  is  needed  before  its  full  objective 
reality  and  potency  can  be  realised  by  the  mind.  By  an 
adequate  subjective  appreciation  of  beauty  is  meant  a  sense 
of  beauty  as  somehow  the  highest  possible  expression  of  the 
ideals  of  human  life,  and  thi^  Schopenhauer  had  not.  It 
has  already  been  said  that  we  must  do  Schopenhauer  the 
justice  of  thinking  of  his  philosophy  of  art  in  the  terms  of 
his  whole  philosophy  of  genius.  By  so  doing  we  read  into  it 
a  breadth  and  a  depth  that  it  cannot  otherwise  have. 

Schopenhauer  could  always  "read  everything  into"  art, 
even  although  his  philosophy  of  art  and  of  genius  suftered 
from  the  fact  that  art  and  genius  gave  to  him  more  the 
seeing- understanding  than  the  sympathy  and  love  which  is 
such  a  necessary  ingredient  in  the  artistic  sense.  He  com- 
pares art  to  the  "  single  free  glance  "  that  a  man  tormented 


252  Schopenhauer's  system. 

with  pain  or  sickness  may  suddenly  have  into  nature;  and 
even  a  single  comparison  like  this  may  be  taken  to  signify  his 
conviction  that  art  brings  complete  peace  into  the  life  of  the 
person  who  is  susceptible  to  its  influence.  Mere  seeing  and 
mere  contemplation,  however,  is  not  enough  :  it  is  one  thing 
to  see  and  understand  and  another  to  act  and  live ;  and  this 
contrast  always  remains  to  the  end  in  Schopenhauer,  Indeed 
he  is  convinced  that  knowing  as  "  insight "  is  foreign  to  willing} 
We  are  tempted,  in  reading  him,  to  linger  eternally  over  the 
vision  that  art  affords,  and  to  forget  that  life  is  meanwhile 
flowing  p.'ist,  and  that  we  must  again  enter  into  it  whether 
we  can  carry  beauty  along  with  us  or  not.  He  says  that  in 
artistic  contemplation  thought  stands  still  and  the  distinction 
between  subject  and  object  "  vanishes  "  ;  but  all  this  is  figur- 
ative and  unreal.  The  faculty,  however,  for  art  is  not  merely 
one  of  our  powers,  or  the  power  of  abstract  contemplation 
alone ;  it  is  all  the  senses  taken  together,  our  wlwle  conscious- 
ness of  reality,  with  the  kinetic  (if  we  may  be  allowed  so  to 
speak)  and  creative  energy  of  which  that  consciousness  is  the 
reflex.  Apart  from  art,  Schopenhauer's  own  life  was  a  "  blind 
will  Tusliing  eternally  into  life."  He  was  an  unregenerate 
youth,  living  in  some  of  the  most  trying  years  of  this  century, 
with  no  one  country  that  he  cared  about  in  particular,  and  no 
relatives  or  friends  for  whom  he  had  any  real  affection.  Plato 
and  art  made  him  live  for  the  first  time,  as  it  were,  but  that 
bliss  was  always  defined  for  him  over  against  his  own  back- 
ground of  "  unsatisfied  will,"  and  the  background  of  political 
chaos  and  incipient  materialism  and  naturalism  and  democratic 
vulgarity  of  the  beginning  of  the  century.  Eomanticism  had 
been  the  only  thing  in  the  spirit  of  the  times  that  had  turned 
men's  thoughts  from  the  material  to  the  ideal  world,  but  the 
historical  aspects  of  romanticism  and  its  vagueness  and  capri- 
cioiisness  were  things  for  which  Schopenhauer  had  no  sym- 

»  Cf.  p.  168,  note  2. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         253 

pathy.  At  the  end  of  the  century  we  have  now  come  back  to 
the  idea  that  even  nature  herself  is  essentially  spiritual  and 
mysterious,  and  that  fine  art  represents  somehow  a  natural 
gradation  of,  or  development  from,  what  is  called  natural 
beauty ;  but  Schopenhauer  saw  the  fine  arts  defined  only 
against  a  world  of  brute  force  and  relentless  causal  law.  In- 
deed (partly,  perhaps,  by  reason  of  his  contempt  for  history, 
and  partly,  perhaps,  from  his  native  perversity  of  mind),  he 
tended  to  think  that  the  glimpses  into  the  inner  nature  of 
the  world  which  pure  art  and  pure  genius  afforded  could 
never  be  otherwise  than  out  of  touch  with  the  spirit  of  the 
times.  "  Genius  in  its  efforts  and  achievements  is  for  the 
most  part  in  contradiction  and  conflict  with  its  times."  ^ 
"  Mere  men  of  talent  are  always  adapted  to  their  day  and 
generation ;  in  fact,  they  are  only  called  forth  by  the  spirit  of 
their  times  and  its  needs,  and  so  they  have  just  the  capacity 
of  satisfying  these  things.  They  therefore  identify  themselves 
with  the  progressive  culture  of  their  contemporaries,  or  with 
the  slow  growth  of  some  particular  science ;  and  for  this  they 
obtain  reward  and  approval.  Of  course  their  performances 
give  no  satisfaction  to  the  next  generation,  and  so  they 
have  to  give  place  to  others,  who  in  their  turn  give  place 
to  still  others.  Genius,  on  the  contrary,  comes  upon  the 
horizon  of  its  times  like  a  comet  on  the  regular  path  of  the 
planets."  '" 

III.  In  unfolding  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art  before  we 
have  studied  his  treatment  of  the  ethical  and  the  religious  con- 
sciousness, a  difficulty  arises  from  the  very  fact  that  we  cannot 
as  yet  fully  know  the  content  or  the  reality  which  art  may  be 
said  to  work  up  or  express.  Art  enables  us  to  idealise  every- 
thing from  mere  matter  up  to  the  unfulfilled  problems  of  our 
moral  and  religious  life,  and  Schopenhauer's  simply  saying  that 
1  Welt  als  Wille,  Verke,  iii.  447.  ^  Ibid. 


2  54  Schopenhauer's  system. 

art  expresses  the  Ideas  seems  too  easy  a  way  of  getting  over 
the  well-known  difficulty  about  the  precise  content  of  our 
aesthetic  perceptions.  He  tells  us,  when  we  look  into  the 
matter,  far  more  what  art  is  not  than  what  it  is.  Nowhere 
in  his  system  is  the  nature  of  artistic  reality  fully  studied  and 
thought  out  in  connection  and  contrast  with  ordinary  reality. 
What  is  the  real  with  which  art  deals  ?  Is  it  ordinary 
reality  treated  simply  in  an  artistic  way  ?  Or  is  it  something 
different  from  ordinary  reality  ?  In  regard  to  this  it  may  be 
said  at  once  that  Schopenhauer  fails  to  treat  of  artistic  pro- 
duction in  a  satisfactory  way,  and  so  does  not  seem  to  have 
been  even  conscious  of  the  difficulties  of  trying  to  see  precisely 
what  it  is  that  the  artist  is  working  up,  or  trying  to  make, 
or  trying  to  create.  His  whole  theory  of  art  is  ontological 
and  statical,  a  thing  of  entities  and  cold  rigid  forms — not 
free  and  expansive  and  adaptive  as  the  artistic  instinct  itself  is. 
The  vision  of  art  is  to  him  as  sudden  as  the  view  of  sunrise 
over  mountain-summits.  It  comes  into  life  "  somehow,"  he 
feels;  but  he  cannot  just  say  how.  "As  regards  the  birth 
of  a  work  of  art  in  a  man's  mind,  if  he  is  only  in  a  sus- 
ceptible mood,  almost  any  object  that  comes  within  his  range 
of  perception  will  begin  to  speak  to  him — in  other  words,  will 
generate  in  him  some  lively,  penetrating,  original  thought. 
So  it  is  that  a  trivial  event  may  become  the  seed  of  a  great  and 
glorious  work.  Jacob  BcJhme  is  said  to  have  been  enlightened 
upon  some  deep  point  of  natural  science  by  the  sudden  sight 
of  a  tin  can."  ^  Art,  he  suggests,  is  simply  "  the  artist  lend- 
ing us  his  eyes."  There  is  some  incidental  matter  in  Schopen- 
hauer about  artistic  production,  and  he  certainly  knows  all 
that  the  average  person  knows  about  it,  and  he  wades  through 
some  of  the  main  discussions  of  his  time  about  the  fine  arts, 
such  as  those  represented  by  Lessing  in  his  '  Laocoiin,'  but  it 
cannot  be  claimed  that  he  has  taught  anything  positive  about 

^  Religion,  &c.,  by  Schop.,  Bailey  Saunders,  p.  140.         ..  ' 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         255 

the  nature  of  artistic  production,  or  anything  which  can 
naturally  be  woven  into  the  essential  meaning  of  his  positive 
thinking.  He  ignores,  in  fact,  the  nature  of  artistic  reality 
as  such,  contenting  himself  simply  with  the  idea  that  artistic 
objects  have  nothing  to  do  with  the  objects  of  the  will.  If 
the  artist  has  not  the  heaven-born  intuition  of  the  Ideas  (which 
Schopenhauer  feels  to  be  a  mysterious  affair  altogether,  an 
affair  of  insight  or  consciousness  or  divine  grace),  he  will  never 
do  anything  positive  in  art.  "  If  the  reader  wishes  for  a 
direct  example  of  the  advantage  which  intuitive  knowledge — 
the  primary  and  fundamental  kind — has  over  abstract  thought, 
as  showing  that  art  reveals  to  us  more  than  we  can  gain  from 
all  the  sciences,  let  him  look  at  a  beautiful  huri:an  face  full 
of  expressive  emotion ;  and  that,  too,  whether  in  nature  itself 
or  as  presented  to  us  by  the  mediation  of  art.  How  much 
deeper  is  the  insight  gained  into  the  essential  character  of  man, 
nay,  into  nature  in  general,  by  this  sight  than  by  all  the  words 
and  abstract  expressions  which  may  be  used  to  describe  it. 
When  a  beautiful  face  beams  with  laughter,  it  is  as  though 
a  fine  landscape  were  suddenly  illuminated  by  a  ray  of  light 
darting  from  the  clouds.  There  lore  ridetc,  pucllce,  ridctc."  ^ 
The  one  thing  that  Schopenhauer  is  most  emphatic  about  is 
how  the  artist  is  not  to  go  to  work ;  that  is,  it  is  at  best  only 
the  form  of  artistic  production  which  he  considers,  and  so  far 
as  the  content  goes  he  simply  lapses  back  into  his  Platonism 
— his  Platonism,  not  his  Plato. 

And  as  is  obvious,  the  form  of  artistic  production  is  con- 
sidered only  in  a  negative  manner  by  Schopenhauer.  The  one 
thing  that  the  artist  must  not  do,  he  maintains,  is  to  use  the 
concept  or  any  mechanical  or  mathematical  or  scientific  device ; 
he  must  not  consider  utility  or  purpose  at  all ;  only  bunglers 
and  inferior  workers,  as  it  were,  do  that,  go  by  rule  of  thumb  or 
by  way  of  calculation.    He  notices  how  real  genius  has  so  often 

^  Werke,  vi.  453,  Parerga  ;  Bailey  Saunders,  Religion,  &c.,  p.  131. 


256  Schopenhauer's  system. 

had  a  frantic  horror  of  the  quantitative  or  the  mathematical 
sciences,  a  horror  to  he  traced  to  the  intuitive  perception  that 
all  "  external  "  ways  of  going  to  work  in  art  will  never  produce 
art,  but  only  mechanical  artifice.'  Architecture,  for  example, 
Schopenhauer  insists,  is  hampered  by  the  fact  that  conceptions 
of  utility  and  design  must  often  enter  into  it ;  and  allegorical 
art,  he  thinks,  is  always  inferior  art,  for  the  reason  that  it  is 
intended  to  teach  something  different  from  the  mere  imagery 
or  representation,  in  which  it  professedly  deals.  Schopenhauer 
could  not  see  that  the  real  problem  of  art  is  just  as  to  how 
we  can  infuse  into  ordinary  reality,  or  into  the  media  of  the 
different  senses  or  of  imagination  and  phantasy,  what  is  called 
spiritual  expression  or  expressiveness  or  spirituality  of  content. 
Goethe  has  explained  for  us  how  he  came,  alter  much  prejudice 
in  favour  of  merely  classical  art,  to  appreciate  the  beautiful 
in  Gothic  architecture.  Schopenhauer  could  find  nothing  in 
Gothic  architecture  but  "  barbarous  formless  fantasticism,"  and 
a  "  false  devotional  utilitarianism,  foreign  to  the  purpose  of 
real  art,"  expressive  of  the  belief  in  a  merely  external  as 
opposed  to  an  internal  God.  Even  the  purpose  of  "  uplifting 
the  mind  of  man  "  is  to  Schopenhauer  still  a  purpose,  and  as 
such  has  nothing  to  do  with  art  at  all.  Only  the  "  clear 
comprehensibility  "  of  the  elemental  forces  find  types  of  nature, 
and  of  the  different  ways  in  which  the  Ideas  express  themselves, 
is  what  we  ought  to  seek  in  art,  according  to  him.  We  see 
that  he  is  strengthened  in  his  tendency  to  exclude  utilitarian 
or  teleological  considerations  from  the  work  of  art  by  the  fact 
that  he  denied  "  purpose "  even  to  the  world-will :  the  will 
was  essentially  irrational  in  all  its  aims,  and  the  only  thing 
that  we  ought  to  look  for  and  find  in  the  Idea  was  in  his  eyes 
simply  finished  expression  and  nothing  more.  Even  when  he 
drops  into  such  descriptions  of  the  work  of  the  artist  as  that 
he  "  recognises  the  Idea  in  the  particular  thing,"  and  thus,  as  it 

*  Cf .  note  on  p.  505. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  uij'  aut.  257 

were,  understands  the  "half-uttered  speech  of  nuture,"  and 
"recalls  clearly  what  she  only  stammered  forth,"  that  he  "ex- 
presses in  the  hard  marhle  the  beauty  of  form,  w  nich  in  a 
thousand  attempts  nature  failed  to  produce,"  and  re  ^resents  it 
to  her,  saying,  as  it  were,  to  her,  "  That  is  what  you  wanted  to 
say  ? "  and  that  whoever  is  able  to  judge  replies,  "  Yes,  that 
is  it ; " — even  when  he  speaks  in  this  way  it  is  not  to  be  for 
one  moment  thought  that  Schopenhauer  is  following  the  road 
entered  upon  to  a  certain  extent  by  Aristotle  when  he  gave 
his  best  account  of  the  work  of  the  artist  as  somehow  idealis- 
ing nature,  and  helping  her  to  bring  her  imperfect  efforts  to 
perfection.^ 

Schopenhauer  is  not  even  at  the  point  of  view  of  the  diffi- 
culties that  riato  encountered  in  trying  to  state  the  kind  of 
reality  with  which  the  artist  deals.  Art  is  not  imitative  to 
Schopenhauer,  because  the  artistic  Ideas  are  more  apprehended 
than  created  or  evolved  by  the  artist  —  merely  seized  by 
him  as  the  "  most  perfect  objectivity,"  the  most  perfect 
manifestation  of  the  world-will.  To  seek  to  explain  art  by 
theories  of  imitation  or  by  an  inductive  comparison  of  the 
features  of  beautiful  things,  savours  to  Schopenhauer  of  the 
"  gall  of  bondage "  of  mere  crass  utilitarianism  and  philis- 
tinism.  The  elements  of  beauty,  he  holds,  are  not  pieced 
together  in  any  way  at  all ;  there  is  no  juxtaposition  or 
mosaic  work  in  the  creation  of  beauty.  He  goes  too  far, 
however,  in  refusing  to  consider  anything  that  ordinary  re- 
flection or  psychology  or  positive  aesthetic  criticism  has  to 
say  about  the  distinguishing  characteristics  of  the  beautiful. 
If  he  had  studied  beautiful  things  in  a  positive  way,  even 
as  far  as  Plato  or  Aristotle  did,  not  to  speak  of  the  German 
writers  upon  exact  aesthetic  theory  in  the  present  century 
or  of  English  writers  like   Mr   Euskin  and  Mr  Morris,  he 

^  Of.    Phys.,  ii.  8,   199  a  15,   ^  "rtxvri  rd,  fiiv  4irirf\(7  &  ij   (pvaris   aSui/aTe? 
ivfpyd(Taff6ai. 

B 


258  Schopenhauer's  systExM. 

would  have  understood  the  nature  of  beauty  far  better  than 
he  did.  But  he  was  far  too  impatient  for  this,  too  eager,  in 
fact,  to  bring  the  whole  realm  of  art  under  one  or  two 
sweeping  generalisations.  Ordinary  things,  he  felt,  were 
simply  phenomenal  manifestations  of  the  will ;  and  the 
one  thing  that  he  felt  he  could  say  about  artistic  objects 
was  that  they  had  nothing  to  do  with  will  or  purpose,  or 
that  they  had  emancipated  themselves  somehow  from  its 
influence.  A  crowning  proof  that  he  had  nothing  positive 
and  constructive  to  say  about  the  content  of  the  artistic 
consciousness  or  the  nature  of  artistic  reality  other  than 
his  mere  reference  of  them  to  the  ideas  (to  Platonism  as 
coloured  by  the  philosophy  of  Plotinus  and  by  Christian 
symbolism),  might  be  found  in  such  a  sentence  as  the  fol- 
lowing :  "  If  the  whole  world  as  idea  is  only  a  manifestation 
of  the  will,  art  is  simply  that  which  makes  tl'is  manifestation 
visible,  a  camera  obscura  which  shows  objects  in  a  clearer  sort 
of  way,  and  enables  us  to  survey  them  better  and  take  them 
in  better  as  a  whole,  simply  the  '  play  in  the  play,'  the  stage 
upon  the  stage  in  '  Hamlet.' "  ^ 

This  makes  us  think  of  Plato's  view  of  art  as  being  twice 
removed  from  reality,  as  copying  things  which  themselves  were 
mere  imperfect  copies  of  Ideas  ;  but  it  is  dangerous  to  compare 
Schopenhauer  with  Plato  in  any  exact  way  so  far  as  the  nature 
of  artistic  reality  goes.  Plato  admitted  that  there  could  be 
Ideas  even  of  manufactured  or  fabricated  things ;  whereas 
Schopenhauer  thought  that  art  never  copied  particuLar  things 
at  all,  never  copied  at  all,  in  fact,  but  simply  represented 
somehow  only  tlie  "  universal "  and  never  the  "  particular " 
element  in  things.  Perhaps  Schopenhauer  is  well  off  in  being 
free  from  all  the  puzzles  of  the  imitative  theory  of  art ;  but  we 
would  rather  have  these  than  nothing  at  all,  because  they 
mako   us   think,  to   some   extent,  of  the  relation  of   artistic 

1  Die  Welt  als  Wille,  Werke,  ii.  315.     Cf.  p.  265. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  259 

reality  to  ordinary  reality.  Equally  little  can  Schopenhauer's 
ideas  be  brought  into  line  with  those  of  Aristotle  and  Hegel, 
who  both  think  of  art  in  connection  with  the  process  of  evolu- 
tion that  is  going  on  in  tlie  world  as  a  whole.  There  is  a 
seeming  contradiction,  too,  between  his  notion  of  the  Ideas  as 
setting  forth  the  most  fundamental  aspects  of  reality  and  the 
notion  conveyed  by  the  metaplior  just  quoted  ("  the  stage  upon 
the  stage  "),  of  art  as  lighting  up  the  illusoriness  of  things  in 
general.  This  contradiction,  however,  is  only  another  example 
of  that  fatal  tendency  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  to  make 
any  light,  that  he  does  seem  to  kindle  for  us,  serve  only  to  make 
the  surrounding  darkness  more  dark.  The  light  of  the  natural 
understanding  seemed  to  show  us  only  what  slaves  of  the 
world-will  we  really  are,  and  the  light  of  art  seems  to  show 
us  only  how  ugly  and  formless  ordinary  reality  is,  and  how 
useless  it  is  for  us  to  try  to  explain  even  artistic  things  them- 
selves by  any  exercise  of  our  natural  reason.  The  artist  is  at 
once  glorified  and  degraded  in  Schopenhauer :  he  has,  it  is 
true,  "  a  seeing  eye,"  but  he  can  give  no  account  of  himself  as 
an  artist ;  he  is  no  real  7rotj}Tj)c  or  maker ;  and  there  is  next 
to  nothing  said  about  what  it  is  that  he  creates,  or  makes,  or 
deals  with.  True  beauty  is  simply  something  that  "  takes 
place "  or  "  appears "  in  the  case  of  the  true  artist.  There 
is  a  certain  value  in  this  idea,  the  value,  namely,  of  reminding 
people  that  there,  is  something  subjective  or  personal  a'oout 
beauty,  and  that  it  cannot  be  understood  apart  from  the 
Imman    personality    and    man's    powers    of    perception    and 

imagination. 

"  'Ti3  God  gives  skill, 
But  not  without  meix's  hands  :  He  could  not  make 
Antonio  Stradivari's  violins 
Without  Antonio." 

Still  Schopenhauer  did  not  develop  the  consequences  of  the 
truth  that  there  is  no  art  without  the  artist  or  the  human 


260  Schopenhauer's  system. 

percipient.  If  he  had,  he  would  perhaps  have  been  able  to 
set  forth  artistic  reality  as  representing  the  highest  evolution 
of  the  consciousness  of  man,  and  consequently  of  the  will 
of  the  world.  But  in  avoiding  the  question  of  the  nature  of 
artistic  reality  —  in  putting  the  matter  in  such  a  negative 
way  as  he  did — he  was  unable  to  make  out  the  strong  case 
for  art  that  he  might  have  done. 


261 


CHAPTER   VI. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art — Continued. 

"  Accordingly  it  is  a  poor  compliment,  though  sometimes  a  fashionable 
one,  to  try  to  i)ay  honour  to  a  work  by  calling  it  an  action.  For  a  work  is 
essentially  higher  in  its  nature.  An  action  is  always  something  based  on 
motive,  and  therefore  fragmentary  and  fleeting — a  part,  in  fact,  of  that 
will  which  is  the  universal  and  oi-iginal  element  in  the  coustitiition  of  the 
world.  But  a  great  and  beautiful  work  has  a  permanent  character,  as  being 
of  universal  significance,  and  sprung  from  the  intellect,  which  rises,  like  a 
perfume,  above  the  faults  and  follies  of  the  world  of  will."  i 

It  is  desirable  to  realise  with  some  degree  of  particularity  and 
exactitude  the  limits  of  Schopenhauer's  treatment  of  art. 
Reflection  upon  the  creative  faculty  of  the  artist,  and  upon 
beauty  as  partly  a  creation  of  the  mind  which  seeks  to  enter 
into  the  more  subtle  secrets  of  nature  and  to  idealise  both 
nature  and  human  life,  is  one  of  the  best  ways  of  realising 
the  extended  meaning  and  the  idealisation  that  Schopenhauer's 
principle  of  will  is  capable  of.  For  it  is  a  principle  which 
can  perfectly  well  be  brought  into  living  relation  to  all  that 
is  best  and  most  real  in  life. 

No  one  who  reads  Schopenhauer  for  any  length  of  time  can 
fail  to  observe  the  profound  influence  that  the  mere  contem- 
idation  of  the  beauty  of  painting  and  sculpture  had  upon  the 
man's  whole  mind  and  being.     It  affected  both  his  activity 

1  Werke,  v.  416  ;  Von  Dem,  was  Einer  vorstellt.  B.  S,,  'The  Wisdom  of  Life 
of  Schop.,'  p.  117. 


262  Schopenhauer's  system. 

and  his  aspiration :  it  made  the  former  simply  one  continued 
search  for  quies  in  otio,  a  life  procul  ncgotiis,  sure  of  itself  in 
its  own  depth  and  tranquillity ;  and  it  gave  to  the  latter  a 
tinge  of  placidity  and  quietism  which  overcame  altogether 
that  volitional  effort  to  surpass  the  present  self  and  to  be 
ever  making  new  conquests,  that  is  commonly  associated  with 
aspiration,  and  that  might  naturally  be  looked  for  in  the 
aspiration  of  a  man  whose  professedly  deepest  conviction  was 
that  effort  and  will  characterise  all  life  and  all  being.  The 
idea  of  aesthetic  contemplation  coloured  his  philosophising 
upon  morality  and  religion :  there  is  surely  a  connection  be- 
tween the  harmony  that  he  talked  of  as  existing  between  the 
percipient  and  the  perceived  thing  in  the  perception  of  beauty 
and  the  sympathy  which  he  claimed  to  be  the  essence  of 
morality ;  ^  and  then  the  insensate  dreamy  contemplation 
which  is  for  him  the  kernel  of  true  religious  feeling  is  only  a 
reflex  of  the  deep  calmful  satisfaction  that  he  felt  in  looldng 
upon  beauty,  as  always  affording  to  its  votaries  a  peace  that 
"the  world  cannot  give."  It  helped  to  determine  his  prevail- 
ing mood  of  mind,  and  consequently  his  literary  style ;  he 
always  writes  of  things  as  if  he  saio  them  in  all  their  plenitude 
and  openness ;  one  really  sees  the  will  rushing  through  life, 
and  all  its  "  hideous  ruin  and  combustion  " ;  and  as  to  "  the 
Ideas  " — well,  it  is  just  as  it  is  in  his  great  master  Plato ; 
they  are  spiritual  essences  which  you  see  and  hear  in  all 
their  visual  and  audible  harmony,  despite  the  unrest  and 
storm  of  the  phenomenal  world.  It  affected  the  way  he 
walked  about  among  men,  always  looking  (as  one  does  in  the 
corridors  of  a  great  gallery)  for  a  vision  at  the  end  of  a  v'.sta — 
a  vision  that  would  naturally  cause  other  things  to  be  seen  in 
mere  perspective — peering  through  the  commonplace  faces 
and  restless  countenances  of  ordinary  men  in  search  for  the 
still  gaze  of  true  genius  and  true  beauty.     And  lastly,  the  love 

'  Cf.  chap.  vii.  • 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  263 

of  artistic  contemplation  became  the  redeeming  thing  about 
the  man's  irresponsible  overpowering  personality,  with  all  its 
irascibility  and  profundity :  it  makes  one  almos*^  like  him  as  a 
man  who  longed  for  the  hidden  meaning  beliind  all  appear- 
ance, and  who  spoke  out  with  perfect  candour  and  directness 
what  he  saw  of  the  good  and  the  evil  in  the  world. 

(a)  Even  as  a  metaphysical  theory  Schopenhauer's  phil- 
osophy of  art  is  very  limited  indeed.  His  theory  is  meta- 
physical partly  because  the  content  that  he  attributes  to  the 
artistic  consciousness  is  transcendental — the  Ideas.  It  is  highly 
formal,  because  he  fails  to  recognise  some  important  concrete 
aspects  of  a3sthetic  feeling  which  give  to  the  perception  of  the 
beautiful  a  great  deal  of  its  meaning.  One  cannot  find  in 
Schopenhauer  an  adequate  psychological  account  of  aesthetic 
feeling,  just  as  one  cannot  find  a  definite  answer  to  the  question 
of  what  it  is  that  makes  an  object  really  beautiful.  Students 
of  aesthetic  proper  and  of  the  psychology  of  esthetics  will  find 
in  him  much  that  is  of  great  value,  for  the  reason,  first,  that 
he  took  up  the  problem  ot  lesthetic  where  Lessing  and  Kant 
left  it ;  and  secondly,  because  hi'j  concrete  a-sthetic  criticism, 
although  largely  incidental  and  casual,  is  always  penetrating 
and  deep,  and  always  carries  with  it  a  feeling  of  complete 
relevancy  and  of  finality.  But  then  it  is  true,  on  the  whole, 
that  he  sacrifices  the  psychological  point  of  view  to  the  meta- 
physical, and  that  in  his  very  desire  to  say  something  absolutely 
final  and  fundamental  about  works  of  art — to  get  their  Idea, 
in  short — he  overlooks  to  too  great  an  extent  the  perceptual 
and  the  imaginative  conditions  of  beauty.  The  tantalising 
thing  about  Schopenhauer  in  his  aesthetic  philosophy  is  that 
he  is  on  the  whole  more  transcendental  even  than  Plato,  and 
far  less  broad  and  systematic  than  Kant. 

It  is  well  known  that  there  are  three  or  four  interesting 
defects  in  Plato's  theory  of  art,  which  show  that  even  he  was 


264  Schopenhauer's  system. 

by  no  means  emancipated  from  the  ordinary  Greek  difficulty 
about  the  work  of  the  artist,  about  his  possibly  either  redupli- 
cating ordinary  reality  or  introducing  a  kind  of  show-reality 
over  and  above  ordinary  reality.  Plato,  too,  did  not  go  so  far 
as  many  modern  Hellenists  in  separating  art  from  morality ; 
he  kept  art,  to  a  certain  extent,  in  touch  with  morality  and 
ordinary  reality,  and  so  is  much  less  "  Platonic  "  and  abstract 
than  some  of  his  followers.  There  is,  however,  nothing,  or 
next  to  nothing,  in  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art  which  lets 
us  see  how  art  is  related  to  ordinary  reality  or  to  the  rioral 
life.  If  he  had  said  that  the  content  of  art  is  to  be  found 
partly  in  ordinary  reality  or  in  ordinary  morality,  we  sliould 
not  have  found  his  tlieorising  so  empty.  He  did  not,  in  fact, 
know  his  two  masters  (Plato  and  Kant)  well  enough  so  far  as 
what  they  said  upon  art  goes.  Indeed  it  is  not  Plato  that 
Schopenhauer  reflects  in  art,  but  the  symbolism  and  trans- 
cendentalism that  came  out  of  Plato  ;  nor  did  he  make  any- 
thing like  the  deliberate  and  careful  attempt  that  Kant  made 
to  connect  aesthetic  theory  with  epistemology  and  teleology 
and  morality.  It  may  be  questioned,  in  fact,  whether  he  had 
not  himself,  in  respect  to  art,  that  sensation  of  "  going  up  in 
a  balloon  "  which  he  said  all  Germans  had  when  they  heard 
the  word  Ideas  pronounced  something  like  Ueddhcn} 

Art  in  Schopenhauer  takes  us  at  once  out  of  the  world,  and 
he  does  not  even  try  to  settle  the  question  of  the  relation  of 
art  to  the  ordinary  life  and  the  ordinary  efforts  of  men.  It 
is  true  that  we  know  well  enough  where  art  stands  in  his 
theory  of  knowledge,  at  least  in  name ;  it  is  said  to  deal  with 
the  Ideas,  while  sense-perception  deals  with  ordinary  things, 
and  science  deals  with  causes  and  effects  and  laws :  but  this 
is  only  an  explanation  in  name — it  is  the  relegation  of  art  to 
a  place  which,  when  we  coi».e  to  look  into  it,  turns  out  to  be 
simply  an  empty  void.     Schopenhauer  probably  thought  that 

»  Cf.  Werke,  i.  113  ;  t).  d.  vierfache  Wurxel. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  op  art.  265 

he  ensured  the  objective  i-f^ality  of  artistic  objects  by  referring 
them  to  the  Ideas,  whicli  all  transcendentalism  after  Plato 
has  been  inclined  to  regard  as  indisputably  real.  But  then, 
when  we  ask  what  it  is  that  the  person  who  perceives  beauty 
has  in  his  consciousness,  we  get  only  the  answer  that  he  has 
an  intuitive  perception  of  an  Idea  which  he  is  quite  sure 
has  nothing  to  do  with  the  will.  This  ocems  very  close  to 
Kant's  description  of  the  artistic  consciousness,  as  the  "  sense 
of  adaptation  in  general  without  the  sense  of  any  special 
purpose  "  to  which  the  artistic  object  is  adapted ;  but  then  we 
have  not  the  same  teleological  or  dynamical  view  of  nature  on 
which  to  rest  a  theory  of  art  that  we  have  in  Kant.  The  will 
(or  nature)  is  essentially  devoid  of  all  purpose  to  Schopenhauer  ; 
and  so,  if  art  deals  with  an  imaginary  kind  of  reality  (the  Ideas) 
resting  upon  a  reality  (the  will)  that  is  or  is  felt  to  be  also 
illusory,  it  becomes  very  hard  to  think  of  art  as  representing 
anything  real  at  all.  It  was  such  a  feeling  on  Schopenhauer's 
part  which  probably  prompted  and  warranted  the  "  stage  upon 
the  stage  "  metaphor.^ 

Nor  did  Schopenhauer  reflect  the  broad  patient  spirit  that 
Kant  showed  in  treating  of  art.  Kant's  '  Criticism  of  Judg- 
ment,' where  both  art  and  teleology  are  discussed,  reflects  the 
whole  thought  of  Kant's  lifetime,  as  well  as  his  infinite  pa- 
tience and  tentative  carefulness.  Art  to  Kant  is  the  great 
mediating  link  between  a  purely  objective  and  a  purely  sub- 
jective philosophy;  it  focuses  all  the  ways  of  looking  at 
reality.  There  are  two  things  in  Schopenhauer's  theory  of 
art  which  most  distinctly  suggest  Kant :  the  idea  that  artistic 
feeling  has  nothing  to  do  with  the  will  suggests  Kant's  vin- 
dication of  artistic  pleasure  as  being  disinterested  pleasure ; 
and,  as  we  have  just  said,  the  idea  that  art  has  nothing  to 
do  with  'tility  and  purpose  suggests  Kant's  famous  and  subtle 
account  of  artistic  adaptation  as  adaptation  without  the  definite 

1  Supra,  p.  258. 


266  Schopenhauer's  system. 

representation  of  any  end — Zivechndssigkeit  in  dcr  Vorstellung 
ohne  alien  Zioeck}  Perhaps  these  two  things  are  one ;  and  if 
so,  it  means  that  a  great  deal  that  seems  distinctive  in  Scho- 
penhauer's theory  of  art  is  to  be  traced  to  Kant.  And  yet, 
although  Schopenhauer  ought  to  have  known  how  important 
Kant's  views  about  art  are  for  the  unification  of  Kant's 
thought,  he  does  not  in  his  main  book  devote  more  than  six  or 
seven  pages  to  the  discussion  of  the  '  Criticism  of  Judgment,' 
and  he  very  seldom  mentions  the  name  of  Kant  in  his  sections 
on  jesthetic  proper. 

Kant's  main  merit,  so  far  as  art  is  concerned,  lies  for 
Schopenhauer  in  the  fact  that  he  did  not  treat  of  art  in  an 
"  empirical  sort  of  way  "  at  all,  that  he  did  not  consider  what, 
as  a  matter  of  fact,  made  an  object  beautiful,  but  that  he  went 
"  to  the  root  of  the  matter  "  in  giving  a  broad  analysis  of  our 
resthetic  consciousness.  He  says  that  Kant  "  led  the  way  "  to 
the  real  theory  of  esthetic  by  considering  the  "  conditions  of 
the  judgment  of  the  beautiful."  He  never  considers  anything 
in  Kant,  which  goes  to  show  that  the  judgment  of  beauty  is 
more  than  merely  subjective.  There  are  indications  in  Kant 
that  beauty  is  in  a  sense  objective,  and  this  is  the  point  where 
the  problem  of  aesthetic  had  to  be  taken  up  after  Kant.  But 
Schopenhauer  thought  that  it  was  the  essence  of  the  artistic 
judgment  to  have  "  nothing  to  do  with  the  will."  This  meant, 
of  course,  that  it  could  not  be  connected  with  teleology  at  all, 
or  with  adaptation  in  nature,  or  with  the  world  as  a  teleologi- 
cal  unity.  Kant  associated  aesthetic  judgment  in  many  ways 
very  closely  with  the  teleological  judgment,  with  the  idea  of 
the  world  as  realised  or  organic  purpose,  but  Schopenhauer 
preferred  to  keep  to  the  idea  of  the  '  Criticism  of  Pure  Reason,' 

'  Kritik  d.  Urtheilskraft,  1  Thl,,  1  Abschn.,  §  11.  "...  die  subjective 
Zweckniiissigkeit  iu  der  Vorstellung  eines  Gegenstandea,  ohne  alien  (weder  objec- 
tiven  noch  subjectiveu)  Zweck."  Cf.  "...  eine  Zweckiuiissigkeit  der  Form 
nach,  auch  ohne  daas  wir  ihr  einen  Zweck  (als  die  Materie  des  nexus  Jinalis)  zum 
Grande  legen   .    .    ."—Ibid.,  §  10. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  267 

that  the  notion  of  eml  was  foisted  on  to  nature  only  by  our 
intellect,  and  had  only  a  subjective  but  no  objective  signifi- 
cance. We  have  already  noticed  how  strange  this  is  in  a 
philosopher  who  makes  out  will  to  be  the  essence  of  reality  : 
if  things  are  really  i-elated  to  the  will,  they  must  in  a  sense 
partake  of  the  objective  reality  of  the  will  itself.  But  there 
is  nothing  in  Schopenhauer  about  the  nature  of  artist'"  pro- 
duction, and  so  it  is  difficult  to  connect  artistic  reality  with 
that  which  alone,  on  Schopenhauer's  principles,  can  give  it 
reality. 

We  now  know,  after  the  help  given  us  chiefly  by  Hegel, 
that  the  outcome  of  the  Critical  Philosophy  is  not  merely 
that  many  things  which  we  took  to  be  objective  (cause,  for  ex- 
ample) are  partly  subjective,  but  that  whatever  our  experience 
compels  us  to  assume  as  really  operative  in  our  experience 
is  real  and  objective.  In  art  we  are  conscious  of  the 
fad  that  nature  docs  attain  to  ends,  and  that  "  the  beautiful " 
is  a  system  of  organic,  living  forms,  which  express  the 
meaning  and  the  reality  of  life  and  of  the  world.  This 
idea  lay  to  a  certain  extent  in  Kant,  but  Schopenhauer 
%vovM  rest  content  with  his  own  niere  transcendentalism 
or  Platonism  about  art.  He  thought  that  the  best  way  to 
"save"  the  reality  of  the  artistic  consciousness  was  to  em- 
phasise its  difference  from  all  other  kinds  of  consciousness 
rather  than  to  connect  it  in  any  way  with  them.  In 
Kant's  philosophy  of  art  is  to  be  read  the  whole  history 
of  the  resthetic  problem  from  Descartes  to  Baumgarten  and 
from  Bacon  to  Kaimes  and  Shaftesbury.  We  can  study 
there  the  whole  question  of  the  compromise  that  must  be 
struck  between  a  rationalistic  and  an  empirical  treatment 
of  the  oesthetic  problem,  and  between  the  philosophy  of  the 
"  universal "  and  the  philosophy  of  the  "  particular  "  so  far 
as  the  elements  of  artistic  reality  go.  The  '  Criticism  of 
Judgment,'    in    fact,    affords    us    the    sight   of    Kant's    mind 


268  Schopenhauer's  system. 

taking  its  broadest  possible  survey  of  reality,  trying  indeed 
to  finally  correlate  the  "  objective  "  and  the  "  subjective  "  ele- 
ments in  experience  ;  the  "  universal  "  and  the  "  particular  "  ; 
and  the  "  finite  "  and  the  "  infinite."  But  Schopenhauer  failed 
to  see  this.  At  the  very  point  in  Kant  where  a  broad 
view  of  reality  as  opposed  to  a  merely  formal  view  was 
the  all -important  matter,  he  was  unequal  to  the  task  of 
appreciating  his  master.  Perhaps  this  was  because  nowhere 
in  Kant's  philosophy  is  the  sense  of  historical  development 
—  of  historical  development  in  general  and  of  the  aesthetic 
consciousness  as  historically  an  element  in  the  struggle  of 
the  mind  of  man  to  grasp  the  "  whole "  of  things  —  so 
necessary  as  in  the  case  of  the  '  Criticism  of  Judgment.' 
Kant's  (esthetic  focussed,  as  it  were,  the  whole  problem  of 
beauty  as  it  had  been  treated  by  the  modern  mind,  and 
just  in  so  far  as  it  did  so  was  Schopenhauer's  lamentable 
want  of  historical  appreciation  and  of  real  "  objectivity "  of 
mind  only  too  apparent  when  he  tried  to  deal  with  its 
difficulties.  A  vague  general  appreciation  of  the  transcen- 
dental or  Platonic  element  in  the  theory  of  aesthetic  is  not 
enough  to  enable  a  man  to  set  forth  an  analysis  of  beauty 
in  general,  or  of  its  supreme  significance  for  the  modern 
mind. 

Nowhere,  in  short,  is  Schopenhauer's  want  of  historical 
sympathy,  and  his  mere  abstract  formalism,  more  disastrous 
in  its  consequences  than  in  his  philosophy  of  art.  The 
difficulty  is  that  his  oesthetic  transcendentalism  may  mean 
"  anything " ;  it  simply  stands  for  the  fact  that  art  enables 
us  somehow  to  see  things  s^ib  specie  cetcrnitatis.  And  as 
every  one  feels  this  about  art,  Schopenhauer  does  not  seem 
to  say  very  much.  It  is  not,  however,  the  essence  of 
art  to  give  merely  a  static  analysis  of  reality.  Our  interest 
in  Schopenhauer's  analysis  of  beauty  is  to  see  whether  he 
gives  us  therein  a  whole  and  a  real  view  of  the  world  as 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  aut.         269 

opposed  to  a  partial  and  an  illusory  one.  The  essence  of  art 
is  that  it  is  creative,  that  it  represents  an  effort  on  the 
part  of  man  to  rise  beyond  the  limits  of  his  life.  Art  is 
not  static  and  perfect  and  impassive  as  Schopenhauer  makes 
it  out  to  be ;  it  is  kinetic  and  evolutionary  and  enthusiastic. 
"  Ernst  ist  das  Zchen,  hcitcr  ist  die  Kund ! "  ]5ut  it  was 
impossible  for  a  philosopher  to  understand  this  who  failed 
to  appreciate  Aristotle's  explanation  of  pleasure  as  the  sense 
of  unimpeded  energy.  Art  is  like  free  pleasure,  and  like 
the  play-impulse  that  Schiller  talked  of  in  connection  with 
it ;  both  "  pleasure  "  and  the  "  play-impulse  "  represent  the 
free  and  the  natural  and  the  spontaneous  energy  of  the 
mind,  and  art,  like  them  both,  is  also  free  and  creative 
in  its  nature.  A  metaphysic  of  art  is  all  very  well  in  its 
way,  but  there  can  be  no  metaphysic  of  art  without  a  psy- 
chology of  art,  without  a  psychology  of  the  artistic  impulse. 

What  we  in  the  end  mean  by  art,  if  we  think  of  the 
matter,  is  fine  or  creative  art,  artistic  production.  Natural 
beauty  is  a  mere  stage  in  the  evolution  of  spiritual  or 
free  beauty.  But  there  is  no  positive  theory  of  artistic 
production  in  Schopenhauer,  although  the  germs  of  it  lay 
certainly  in  both  Plato  and  Kant.  Schopenhauer  saw  what 
it  was  negatively ;  he  said  that  it  had  nothing  to  do  with 
mechanical  construction  or  utilitarian  contrivance,  but  that 
was  all.  His  ingenious  and  in  the  main  correct  notion  of 
the  Ideas  as  representing  the  various  "  grades  of  the  objecti- 
fication  of  the  will,"  makes  one  think  that  in  his  resthetic 
he  ought  somehow  to  give  a  dynamic  or  evolutionary  ac- 
count of  art;  art  is  said  by  him  to  represent  the  various 
grades  or  planes  of  existence,  and  to  tell  us,  so  to  speak, 
what  nature  is  trying  to  do.  But  Schopenhauer  really  can- 
not see  how  art  completes  the  work  of  nature,  because  he 
does  not  think  of  the  artist  as  creatively  doing  anything ; 
the   artist    simply  "  finds,"    he    tells    us,  the   vision  of    the 


270  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Ideas  in  himself,  but  he  cannot  see  how  it  was  generated. 
"  In  resthetic  contemplation,  the  particular  thing  suddenl// 
becomes  the  Idea  of  its  species,  and  the  contemplating  person 
a  ^»(rc  subject  of  hnowlcdgc."  Now  it  is  the  outcome  of  a 
sound  ii'sthetic  philosophy  to  hold  that  even  natural  beauty 
cannot  be  understood  save  as,  to  a  certain  extent,  the  crea- 
tion of  beings  who  see  it,  and  consequently  the  line  between 
natural  and  artificial  beauty  is  hard  to  draw.  Neither  nat- 
ural beauty  nor  created  beauty  can  be  understood  apart  from 
the  manner  and  fact  of  its  production  or  creation  by  the 
artistic  subject  or  percipient.  The  world  has  always  felt 
that   art    is    somehow    dependent    on    the    existence    of    the 

artist : — 

"  Is  it  you,  O  beauty,  0  grace, 
O  clianu,  0  romance,  that  we  feel, 
Or  the  voice  which  reveals  what  you  are  ? "  ' 

Schopenhauer's  notion  of  the  Ideas  as  representing  the  dif- 
ferent grades  of  the  will,  and  of  the  artist  as  simply  "  lend- 
ing us  his  eyes,"  makes  us  almost  suspect  that  he  is  dealing 
or  ought  to  be  dealing  chiefly  with  natural  beauty,  and  only 
indirectly  with  artistic  or  created  beauty."  And  then  the 
whole  passive -like  character  that  artistic  appreciation  has 
in  his  eyes,  makes  us  feel  that  his  treatment  of  beauty 
is  too  easy  and  superficial — he  thinks  of  it  far  too  much 
as  something  already  made  (instead  of  to  be  made)  by  the 
co-operation  or  creative  activity  of  the  percipient.  All  who 
truly  understand  the  perception  of  the  beautiful  must 
feel  that  beauty  has  in  a  sense  to  be  made  in  order  to  be 
understood.  Schopenhauer  would  not  irtudy  the  evolution  of 
the  feeling  for  beauty  as  a  feature  in  th?!  history  of  civil- 
isation ;   there   could   be   "  nothing   new   under   the   sun,"  he 

'  M.  Arnold,  '  The  Youth  of  Nature.' 

-  The  reference  to  the  "  essential  and  original  forms  of  animate  aL'd  inanimate 
nature,"  in  the  quotation  at  the  head  of  chapter  v.,  is  characteristic.  The  idea 
of  human  life  seems  to  be  absent  from  it. 


SCHOrENHAUER's    PHILOSOPHY   OF   ART.  271 

tliought ;  he  virtually  insisted  that  we  must  understand 
beauty  once  and  for  all.  With  such  ideas  be  very  naturally 
went  to  the  Greeks  and  stayed  there  to  worship,  liut  he 
never  came  back  to  explain  in  modern  languajj;e  or  in  a 
modern  way  the  fact  that  art  somehow  sets  forth  the  in- 
finite expressiveness  or  significance  of  life.  And  even  in 
learning  from  the  Greeks  he  overlooked  all  the  attempted 
analyses  of  ii\sthetic  perception  that  were  to  be  found  in 
I'lato  and  Aristotle ;  he  simply  took  his  notions  of  the 
content  of  beauty  from  Plato,  and  said  that  that  was  the 
"  Ideas."  He  did  so  far  give  a  modern  version  of  the 
Ideas,  by  making  them  out  to  be  connected  with  the  differ- 
ent species  or  grades  of  existence,  but  he  did  not  go  on 
to  incorporate  them  with  the  dynamic  view  of  reality  to 
which  modern  natural  science  was  already  committed  in 
his  days,  and  to  which  his  own  theory  of  tlie  world  as  will 
inevitably  commits  him.  The  only  thing  he  had  to  do,  and 
could  have  done,  was  to  connect  art  loith  the  toill,  with  the 
effort  to  realise  ever  higher  and  higher  forms  of  life ;  but 
he  could  not  do  this  by  reason  of  the  many  defects  in  his 
theory  of  knowledge  and  in  his  view  of  will  (he  took  the 
lowest  type  of  will  instead  of  the  highest  as  his  principle 
for  explaining  things).  And  again  he  could  not  do  it  by 
reason  of  the  fact  that  his  view  of  art  was  so  static  and 
so  little  dynamic.  Aristotle  puts  us  on  the  right  path  for 
understanding  art,  as  for  understanding  most  other  things. 
In  his  eyes,  the  artist  could  help  nature  to  evolve  and 
to  perfect  her  work,  and  tlius  bring  her  to  her  highest 
development  in  the  spiritual  and  ideal  purposes  of  man. 
But  for  all  this  Schopenhauer  had  no  sense.  He  had  no 
feeling  for  the  world  as  an  organic  or  unified  whole :  the 
world  was  cleft  for  him  into  two  halves  (Will  and  Idea,  or 
noumenon  and  phenomenon)  winch  could  never  be  brought 
into  vital  relation  with  each  other.     Even  his  generalisation 


272  Schopenhauer's  system. 

of  all  things  as  will  did  not  enablo  him  to  take  a  direct 
and  free  and  flexible  hold  upon  all  reality.  Both  nature 
and  huniivn  life — the  subject-matter  of  art — were  to  him 
essentially  illusory ;  the  one  concealed  an  ultimate  reality 
(the  will)  which  could  never  be  known  or  definitely  ex- 
pressed/ and  the  other  revealed  nothing  but  blind  strife " 
and  confusion — the  aindess  effort  to  be. 

If  we  look  at  the  formalism  of  Schopenhauer's  views  upon 
art,  we  shall  feel  that  he  did  not  indeed  advance  very  far  be- 
yond the  Greeks.  His  whole  philosophy  of  art  seems  almost 
a  phase  of  that  glorification  of  Greek  statuary  and  archi- 
tecture, which  was  a  kind  of  worship  in  his  days,  with  its 
Neo-Hellenisra  as  opposed  to  crude  Protestantism  and  Judaistic 
theism.  Schopenhauer  certainly  never  feit  the  full  force  of 
the  modern  gospel  of  Eomanticism,  with  its  exaltation  of  the 
need  of  a  free  and  expansive  (and  even  fantastic  and  ex- 
travagant) sense  for  beauty  and  reality.  It  would  probably 
have  shocked  him  very  nmch  to  think  that  there  was  colour 
and  ornament  even  in  Greek  statuary  and  architecture.  He 
certainly  could  not  bring  tlie  little  that  he  did  see  in  the 
modern  sense  for  tragedy  and  romantic  beauty  into  harmony 
with  his  preference  for  Greek  over  Gothic  architecture.  (He 
liated  the  Middle  Ages,  with  their  repression  of  the  mind  and 
life  of  the  individual,  if  indeed  he  ever  thought  of  them.)  He 
at  once  maintains  that  Gothic  architecture  is  barbaric  and 
fantastic  (Saracenic  in  its  origin,  he  says),  and  formless  and 
spurious  in  conception — the  antithesis  of  art,  in  fact ;  and  yet 
at  the  same  time  holds  that  modern  tragedy  is  to  be  placed 
far  above  Greek  tragedy,  because  the  ancients  "had  not  yet 
attained  to  the  summit  and  goal  of  tragedy,  or  indeed  of 
insight  into  life  itself." 

But  how  could  a  man  have  a  complete  theory  of  art  who 
refused  to  feel  his  way  sympathetically  through  all  the  efforts 

1  Cf.  chu.p.  iii.,  the  close.  ^  Cf.  chap,  vii.,  the  beginning. 


SCHOPENHAUElt's    PHILOSOPHY    OF   ART.  273 

that  the  spirit  of  man  had  made  to  assert  itself  from  the  time 
of   the  Eenaissance  to  the  French  Revolution  ?     Eadem  sal 
alitcr  is  too  one-sided  a  maxim  to  be  of  much  use  in  a3sthetic. 
It  is  all  very  well  to  say  that  art  represents  the  "  Ideas  " ;  l)ut 
then,  there  is  an  evolution  of  the  Ideas  or  the  ideal  import  of 
the  world  in  time,  an  evolution  that  is  manifested  in  man's  life 
and  in  the  life  of  things ;  and  it  is  in  fact  this  evolution  of 
the  ideal  meaning  of  the  world  that  art  may  be  said  to  aim  at 
expressing.     The  Greeks  conceived  of  beauty  as  formal  and 
abstract,  the  moderns  of  beauty  as  characteristic  and  expres- 
sive and  concrete.^     The  "  Hegelians  "  were  trying  as  hard  as 
they  could  to  make  beauty  more  objective  and  real  than  Kant 
had  left  it,  but  of  course  they  were  "  too  great  blockheads  "  in 
inetaphysic  in  Schopenhauer's  eyes  to  make  him  wish  to  have 
anything   to   do   with   them    in   esthetic.       The    student    of 
aisthetic  theories  is  largely  baflled  and  confused,  and  simply 
irritated,  in  trying  to  give  Schopenhauer  a  place  in  the  history 
of  festhetic.     It  is  easy  to  explain  him  as  coming  in  a  manner 
after  Kant  in  that  peculiar  period  of  transition  and  slow  recon- 
struction  through   which   Germany  passed  in  the  first  three 
decades  of  this  century ;  but  he  would  not  have  wished  to 
have  himself  located  at  all.     Just  because  he  did  not  feel  the 
necessity  of  understanding  beauty  historically  and  psychologi- 
cally, he  could  not  clearly  and  comprehensively  show  how  the 
artistic  consciousness  was  the  one  thing  to  be  exalted  by  the 
spirit  of  man  as  capable  of  affording  him  a  rounded  view  of 
the  world  and  of  reality.      It  may  be  safely  said  that   the 
arts  cannot  be  classified  by  one  who  does  not  really  care  about 
understanding  the  history  of  the  theory  of  beauty.     Schopen- 
hauer has  some  ingenious  and  suggestive  formal  philosophising 
about  the  relation  of  architecture  to  music — the  two  arts  that 
represent  respectively  the  "  bottom "  and   the  "  top "  of  the 
artistic  ladder, — about  the  logical  connection  between  "  sym- 

^  Cf.  Bosanquet,  History  of  iEsthetic,  passim. 
S 


274  Schopenhauer's  system. 

metry  "  (the  secret  of  architecture)  and  "  rhythm  "  (the  secret 
of  music),  but  the  whole  thing  is  strained  to  the  breaking- 
point.  It  is  the  old  story  of  his  trying  always  to  see  in  art 
rather  tlian  to  feel ;  one  may  say  that  one  sees  temples  and 
figures  and  colour  and  tragedy  and  comedy  in  music — the 
highest  art  must  in  a  sense  include  the  characteristic  features 
of  all  the  others — but  in  music  we  pass  from  seeing  to  feeling, 
from  one  sense  to  another,  to  a  new  creation  in  fact — 

"  That  out  of  three  sounds  he  t'rame,  not  a  fourth  sound,  but  a  star." 

The  history  of  art,  which  is  an  essential  part  of  the  meta- 
physic  of  art — the  best  instance  perhaps  of  the  necessity  of 
history  to  criticism — can  show  us  how  man  has  nf^'^ded  first 
one  sense  and  one  medium  and  then  anotlier  sense  and  another 
medium  by  means  of  which  to  express  his  feeling  for  things 
and  to  gain  a  consciousness  of  the  reality  of  things,  and  then 
finally  his  whole  creative  and  evolving  consciousness  to  feel 
out  and  to  express  the  essential  relations  and  meanings  of 
things.  Schopenhauer's  classification  of  the  arts  has  little 
reference  to  their  history,  and  impresses  one  as  too  arbitrary 
and  rigid  to  be  of  r.iuch  use  in  enablhig  us  to  understand 
history. 

(j3)  It  would  be  easy  to  show  further  how  Schopenhauer's 
theory  of  art  is  lacking  in  many  other  ways — how  it  leaves  out 
many  things  that  form  part  of  the  theory  of  beauty.  It  is 
very  strange,  for  example,  that  he  has  not  an  elaborate  treat- 
ment of  the  ugbj  as  a  species  or  variety  of  artistic  perception. 
Why  does  he  not  make  much  of  it  with  a  view  to  the  pessi- 
mistic or  negative  side  of  Ins  philosophy  ?  His  illusionism  is 
at  any  rate  largely  a  glorification  of  the  eternal  defect  in  things, 
of  the  eternal  defect  of  the^wt^e  as  such.  With  the  ugly  would 
come,  to  be  sure,  the  bad,  and  sin  and  misery,  and  the  whole 
philosophy  of  tlie  defective  and  the  finite.     For  this  we  have 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         275 

to  go  to  our  author's  views  upon  religion.  The  ugly  (as  well 
as  the  fantastic  and  the  ridiculous)  has  indeed  a  place  in  the 
philosophy  of  art,  but  Schopenhauer  did  not  fully  realise  tlie 
fact. 

It  is  difficult  even  to  indicate  the  place  that  art  as  such 
has   in  Schopenhauer's   system.     Art,  in  a  sense,  makes  his 
system,  as  well  as  the  world  in  general,  seem  illusory.    Ordinary 
reality  is  to  Schopenhauer,  as  we  have  seen,  illusory  on  the 
presuppositions  of  ordinary  idealism  that  things  are  mere  phe- 
nomena of  the  senses.    Then  the  reality  which  the  understand- 
ing reveals  to  us,  reality  as  defined  by  the  so-called  laws  of 
science,  is  also  illusory ;  the  order  that  is  here  considered  is 
largely  an  order  of  our  own  making,  and  we  never  do  and 
never  can  get  to  the  ultimate  nature  of  things  from  the  stand- 
point alone  of  science  and  the  scientific  understanding,  and  this 
all  wise  scientists  admit.    And  now  beautiful  objects  in  nature 
or  in  art — the  absence  of  a  theory  of  the  distinction  makes 
the  "  confusion  worse  confounded " — can   become   real  to  us 
only  if  we  let  go  our  hold  on  everything  else  and  live  (die  ?) 
for  these  things  alone — lose  our  personality,  as  it  were,  in 
them.     This  whole  vein  of  illusionism  doubtless  expresses  the 
confusion  that   many   minds   feel  in   being  driven,   in   their 
search  for  reality,  from  common-sense  to  the  philosophical  con- 
sciousness of  things,  and  then  from  that  to  art,  and  from  art 
to  mysticism ;  nowhere  do  they  seem  privileged  to  plant  their 
feet  firmly  upon  any  one  thing.^    We  could  give  up  everything 
for  beauty,  if  beauty  really  lit  up  the  world  for  us  anew,  as 
the  highest  religious  faith  does  for  many  people.     Schopen- 
hauer, however,  practically  tells  us  (what  he  impresses  us  as 
having  himself  felt)  that  the  person  who  has  experienced  the 
extvHf^tion  of   artistic  insight   has  no   taste  left  for  ordinary 
reality.     One   wonders  whether  it  is   essentially  true  of  all 
idealism,  that   it   tends   to  make  us  lose  our  hold  upon  all 

^  Cf.  chaps,  ix.  and  x. 


276  Schopenhauer's  system. 

reality.  It  may  be.  Idealism  may  be  apparently  convincing 
to  some  extent  about  reality,  as  has  been  suggested  in  the 
chapter  in  which  it  was  discussed,  but  it  seems  to  fail  us  and 
become  illusory  at  the  last.  Would  Schopenhauer  have  been 
the  victim  of  idealistic  illusionism  if  he  had  carved  his  way 
into  the  meaning  of  life  with  modern  realism  and  modern 
romanticism  ?  What  of  Eembrandt  and  of  Corot,  and  of  Jean 
Frangois  Millet  ?  What  of  Rubens  with  his  passionate  devo- 
tion to  the  representation  of  action,  and  of  Murillo's  boys  at 
play,  and  so  on?  But  then,  on  the  other  hand,  there  is 
Plato  and  his  immortal  cave  simile,  and  Schopenhauer  felt 
with  Plato  that  "  Those  who,  outside  the  cave,  have  seen  the 
true  sunlight  and  the  things  that  have  true  being  (Ideas), 
cannot  afterwards  see  properly  down  in  the  cave,  because  their 
eyes  are  not  accustomed  to  the  darkness ;  they  cannot  dis- 
tinguish the  shapes,  and  are  jeered  at  for  their  mistakes  by 
those  who  have  never  left  the  cave  and  its  shadows";  and 
"  that  there  can  be  no  true  poetry  without  a  certain  madness ; 
that,  in  fact,  every  one  appears  mad  who  recognises  eternal 
Ideas  in  fleeting  things."^ 

There  does  seem  something  inevitable  about  all  this.  And 
so  Schopenhauer's  whole  system  is  a  kind  of  illusionism  about 
all  reality.  "  There  is  an  unconscious  propriety  in  the  way  in 
which,  in  all  European  languages,  the  word  person  is  commonly 
used  to  denote  a  human  being.  The  real  meaning  of  persona 
is  a  maeh,  such  as  actors  were  accustomed  to  wear  on  the 
ancient  stage ;  and  it  is  quite  true  that  no  one  shows  himself 
as  he  is,  but  wears  his  mask  and  plays  his  part.  Indeed  the 
whole  of  our  social  arrangements  may  be  likened  to  a  per- 
petual comedy ;  and  this  is  why  a  man  who  is  worth  anything 
finds  society  so  stupid,  while  a  blockhead  is  quite  at  home  in 
it "  ^     The  tantalising  thing  is  that  the  highest  aspect  we  have 

1  World  as  Will,  i.  247  (H.  and  K.) 

"  Werke,  vi.  623  ;  B.  Saunders,  Studies  in  Pessimism,  p.  61. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         277 

yet  reached  of  this   illusionism  is  the  ilhisiorism   about  art 
itself — about  the  very  thing  that  we  have  been  led  by  bchop- 
enhauer  to  look  forward  to  as  a  refuge   from    the    bondage 
of  ordinary  life.     Has  art  a  hold  on  reality  or  has  it  not  ? 
Schopenhauer  maintains  that  the  man  of  genius  is  infinitely 
more  sensitive  than  all  other  men,  and  so  excels  all  other  men 
in  that  susceptibility  which  is  essentially  a  human  character- 
istic, seeing  that  "  no  beast  can  adequately  compare  with  man," 
so  far  as  "  sensitivity  "  goes,  sensitivity  to  impressions.     The 
genius   is   "  infinitely   more    sensitive,"    he    says,   to    all    the 
aspects  of  life  than  the  ordinary  man.     "  Well,  then  ! "  we 
exclaim,   "  the  genius   has  a  truer   or   more   real    hold  upon 
things  than  ordinary  men  have  ;  his  being  more  sensitive  means 
that  he   sees   and   feels   more."      "No,"  says  Schopenhauer, 
"  that  is  just  wb^it  makes  him  so  excruciatingly  unhappy  ! " 
"  And  so  we  understand  how  it  is  that  some  men  of  genius 
cannot  look  upon  other  men,  with  their  monotonous  counte- 
nances and  universal  stamp  of  mediocrity,  as  human  beings 
at  all ;  they  cannot  find  their  equals  in  these  men,  and   so 
naturally   fall    into   the   error   of    regarding    their   own   high 
standard  as  the  normal  one.^     It  is  in  this  sense  that  Diogenes 
went  about   with  a  lam^j   seeking   for   a  man;    and  in  that 
work  of  genius,  the  Koheleth,  we  read,  "  Out  of  a  thousand 
have  I  found  one  man,  but  not  one  woman  among  all  these." 
But   why  should  genius   and   why  should   art   thus   spoil    a 
man  for  perceiving  meaning  and  importance  in  ordinary  things 
and  ordinary  people  ?  "^     Schopenhauer's  whole  system  tends 
to   show   the   nugatoriness   of  ordinary  life   and   of  ordinary 
reality  in  face  of  the  vision  of  the  Ideas — all  that  appears  to 
him  simply  "  nothing,"  only  the  "  form  of  the  appearance,"  the 
"grades  of  being"  in  which  the  will  chooses  for  the  nonce 

^  Schop.,  Uber  den  Willen  in  der  Natur— Physiologie  u.  Pathologic. 

^  Schiller  shall  answer  this  question  for  us  :  "  In  seinein  Gebiete  inuss  auch 
der  miichtigste  Genius  sich  seiner  Hoheit  begeben  und  zu  deni  Kindersinn  ver- 
traulich  herniedersteigen."— U.  d.  iisth.  Erzieh.,  &c.,  Brief  x.\vii. 


2V8  Schopenhauer's  system. 

to  appear.  What  the  world  expresses  (the  Ideas)  is  every- 
thing, as  it  were  ;  the  world  itself  is  essentially  nothing.  It 
is  Schopenhauer's  old  tendency  simply  to  see  and  to  understand 
tliat  -^"^serts  itself  in  all  that  he  v/rites  in  this  strain — his 
tendency  to  think  only  of  the  universal  and  to  neglect  the 
particular.  In  so  far,  perhaps,  as  a  philosopher  has  this  ten- 
dency, he  is  apt  not  to  be  the  best  critic  of  works  of  art. 
But  if  the  philosopher  or  any  one  else  does  fall  into  this 
tendency,  this  attitude  of  regarding  life,  Schopenhauer's  system 
will  afford  him  real  food  by  the  way  it  has  of  squeezing  the 
idea  out  of  everything,  and  then  throwing  away  what  seems 
to  be  left.  This,  we  can  see,  is  intellectualism  in  excess,  and 
it  must  be  confessed  that  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art  is 
far  too  intellectual.  In  real  art  there  is  enjoyment  and 
lingering  feeling  and  perfect  satisfaction ;  but  there  is  no 
enjoyment,  no  Genuss,  no  pleasurable  satisfaction  in  the  con- 
templation of  beauty  as  Schopenhauer  sets  it  forth.  His 
theory  of  artistic  insight  is  far  too  metaphysical  and  too 
little  psychological.  As  soon  as  he  has  seen  a  thing  or  a 
person  in  the  light  of  the  Idea,  he  has  apparently  "  done 
with  it."  All  intellectual  artists  have  this  tendency  merely 
to  see  what  a  thing  is,  and  then  to  "  have  done  with  it." 
Goethe  had  something  of  it  in  his  attitude  towards  women 
and  towards  life  as  a  whole.  Leonardo  da  Vinci  had  it; 
hence  that  consummate  intellectualism  in  his  faces,  and  the 
play  of  irony  thai  lives  on  their  lips  ;  they  express  one  Idea 
eternally,  but  they  are  all  the  time  conscious  of  the  limita- 
tions of  this  expression,  and  might  equally  well  have  been 
made  by  their  master  to  have  set  forth  something  else.^  It 
is  the  same  too  in  philosophy  with  Hegel  —  in  Hegel's 
dialectic :  as  soon  as  a  thing  is  therein  imderstood  it  ceases 
to  have  any  more  meaning,  in  fact  any  more  existence. 

■  ^  Cf.  "The  Holy  Family  with  St  Anne,"  and  the  "St  John  the  Baptist,"  in 
the  Louvre.     The  St  John  might  represent  a  Circe.  - 


SCHOPENHAUER  S   PHILOSOPHY    OF    ART.  279 

All  Schopenhauer's  descriptions  of  art  have  the  irony  of 
genius  running  through  them, — the  feeling  that  raucli  of  life 
is  mere  surface-play,  as  it  were,  mere  illusion.  What  he  says 
is  often  extremely  satisfactory  in  an  intellectual  regard,  but  it 
is  too  utterly  soulless.  He  never  seriously  studied  feeling 
as  something  that  mediates  between  intellect  and  volition, 
as  something  that  is  in  a  sense  a  blending  of  both.  He 
is  strong  enough  to  treat  often  of  feeling  and  passion  more 
mathematico  as  Spinoza  did,  but  he  is  not  appreciative  enough 
of  the  element  of  spontaneous  creative  feeling  in  art  proper. 
There  is  no  positive  feeling  in  his  art,  and  art  without  feeling 
is  dead  and  illusory.  He  said,^  we  remember,  that  feeling 
is  essentially  negative,  denoting  only  that  something  is — not 
thoiight  but  merely — feli.  This  explains  the  formalism  of  all 
that  he  writes  upon  art.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  feeling 
has  to  do  vvith  energy  or  effort  (it  measures  effort),  with  the 
struggle  for  life  and  better  life ;  and  consequently  the  will 
ought  to  enter  into  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art.  How 
contradictory  it  is  to  hold  that  the  will  does  not  enter  into 
art,  and  yet  that  tl)e  Ideas  express  the  grades  of  tlie  will, 
and  that  the  arts  may  be  graded  according  to  the  grades  of 
the  will  that  they  express !  In  art  we  see  the  consequences 
of  Schopenhauer's  original  error,  his  itpCjrov  \pfv^og,  that 
ordinary  reality  is  illusory.  If  we  question  the  reality  of 
one  grade  of  reality,  one  grade  of  the  will,  we  shall  likely 
go  on  to  question  the  reality  of  other  grades.  If  the  primary 
qualities  of  matter  are  nothing,  are  only  subjective,  then  the 
Ideas  of  art  may  possibly  be  subjective  too.  And  it  is  so  in 
Schopenhauer.  Art  really  shows  up  only  the  unreality  of 
things.  Again,  any  one  grade  of  the  will  ought  to  be  just 
as  good  as  any  other  grade.  All  things  are  perfect  in  their 
kind ;  a  good  tree  seems  just  as  real  as  a  good  magnet  or  a 
good  man.     Art  is  apparently  a  reflex  of  reality,  but  if  reality 

^  See  chap.  i.  p.  4. 


280  sceopenhauer's  system. 

is  illusory,  art  will  likely  be  illusory  too.  It  is  all  very 
well  to  say  that  art  copies  or  expresses  Ideas,  but  then  the 
Ideas  are  the  quintessence  of  things,  and  if  things  are  illusory 
the  Ideas  may  be  illusory  too.  We  are  never,  in  short,  free 
in  Schopenhauer  from  a  large  amount  of  illusionism  about  art 
itself.  He  felt  this  illusionism  himself,  and  fell  into  the 
danger  of  saying  that  art  was  like  "  the  stage  upon  the  sta<jc 
in  '  Hamlet.'  "  Indeed  he  has  no  real  standing-ground  in 
the  matter.  We  have  seen  his  attempt  to  grade  reality,  and 
to  grade  the  arts  in  accordance  with  the  kind  of  reality  that 
they  express,  but  he  had  not  the  courage  or  thought  to  make 
out  the  highest  grade  of  reality  to  be  the  most  real  grade 
of  reality,  and  so  the  highest  arts  the  most  real  of  the  arts ; 
and  so  the  whole  of  art  as  representing  for  man  the  final  way 
of  looking  at  reality.  He  is  an  idealist,  and  an  idealist  who, 
having  questioned  reality  once,  questioned  it  twice,  and  more 
than  twice.  He  traces  everything  to  the  will,  but  we 
nowhere  seem  to  get  hold  of  the  will.  If  we  had  got  hold 
of  it  in  artistic  creation  and  aspiratioa,  we  should  not  have 
demurred  so  much.  The  highest  of  the  arts  simply  takes 
Schopenhauer  back  to  the  beginning  of  the  cosmic  process. 
Music,  he  says,  is  simply  the  rhythm  of  the  will  that  is  trying 
to  assert  itself.  That  is,  the  will  having  toiled  its  way  up 
to  man,  simply  begins  to  hymn  itself  over  again  as  a  mere 
potency  and  no  more.  The  will  commits  suicide,  so  to  speak, 
in  music,  passing  through  expressibility  into  inexpressibility 
and  mere  potency.^ 

The  defect  of  this  whole  line  of  thought  is  just  the  fact 
that  it  is  simply  a  line  of  thought ;   it  never  stops  to  take 

^  It  seems  to  me  that  the  effect  which  Wagner's  music  produces  upon  certain 
people  indicates  the  fact  of  its  being  to  some  extent  an  example  of  what  is  here 
put  forth  as  Schopenhauer's  doctrine.  In  so  far  as  Wagner's  music  often  illus- 
trates the  transition  from  what  is  inartistic  (merely  natural)  to  the  truly  artistic 
(what  has  been  "  born  again  "  of  the  mind  or  of  true  mental  form),  it  has  a  peda- 
gogical rather  than  an  artistic  significance — it  represents  devices  for  interesting 
the  unmusical  in  music.     Cf.  p.  249. 


Schopenhauer's  thilosophy  of  art.         281 

hold  of  anything  :  it  began  by  questioning  the  reality  of  ordin- 
ary experience,  and  it  now  questions  the  reality  of  artistic  ex- 
perience. The  intellectuality  of  Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art 
is  enough  to  destroy  it  altogether  :  art,  he  says,  has  "  nothing 
to  do  with  the  will " ;  it  bids  us  be  at  rest  rather  than  go  on 
to  be  and  to  evolve.  No  doubt  we  must  allow  for  a  certain 
inevitable  abstractness  and  formalism  in  any  attempt  to  say 
what  art  is  on  its  own  account.  The  mind  often  views  things 
"  apart "  which  really  cannot  be  viewed  apart.  "Art  for  art's 
sake  "  is  largely  meaningless  for  this  very  reason.  The  fact 
that  Schopenhauer  isolates  art  from  life  is  alone  enough  to 
make  art  seem  illusory.  And  naturally  enough  there  is 
another  fatal  consequence  of  this  abstraction :  remove  beauty 
far  enough  away  from  life,  and  life  itself  will  seem  a  pretty 
poor  thing.  "  If  we  take  out  of  life  its  few  moments  of 
religion,  of  art,  and  of  pure  love,  what  is  left  but  a  long  series 
of  trivial  thoughts  ? "  But  we  cannot  take  these  things  out 
of  life !  they  are  in  life  and  of  it !  It  is  no  use  to  think 
of  isolating  them  and  separating  them  from  the  rest  of  life — 
to  think  of  them  merely  hy  tuay  of  idea.  Art  must  be  realistic 
as  well  as  idealistic — must  take  firm  hold  of  reality,  however 
commonplace  it  may  at  first  appear  to  be.  Artistic  realism  is 
a  thing  that  Schopenhauer  did  not  face,  and  this  again  in  spite 
of  the  fact  that  he  did  not  believe  in  a  dualism  between  mind 
and  body.^  If  he  had  studied  realism  in  art  he  would  have 
seeii  both  nature  and  man  trying  to  evolve  the  highest  kind 
of  reality,  and  this  would  have  enabled  him  to  become  a 
concrete  instead  of  an  abstract  idealist,  and  to  have  connected 
his  Ideas  with  reality  and  with  the  human  personality.  He 
might  have  seen  that  the  highest  effort  of  art  is  to  realise 
a  complete  and  perfected  human  individuality  or  person. 
Poetry  is  the  most  universal  expression  of  human  life,  and  not 
merely  an  endless  comment  or  variation  upon  a  few  tran- 

1  Cf.  p.  27. 


282  SCHOPENHAHFR  S   SYSTEM. 

scendental  Ideas.  In  other  words,  Schopenhauer  filled  to 
connect  formal  or  abstract  beauty  with  vital  beauty,  and  his 
whole  philosophy  of  art  suffered  from  this  defect. 

There  are  but  two  things  in  Schopenhauer's  whole  philoso- 
phy— the  will  and  the  idea.^  They  are  not  reconciled  with 
each  other,  but  tend  in  turn  to  assert  themselves  and  to 
destroy  one  another.  All  through  the  system  the  influence 
of  each  is  felt  equally  strongly,  and  it  would  be  difficult  to 
say  which  is  emphasised  more  strongly  by  Schopenhauer 
himself.  Inasmuch  as  he  is  a  metaphysician,  he  cares 
supremely  for  the  idea,  and  it  is  somehow  made  by  him 
finally  to  overtake  the  will  and  to  throw  it  back  into  a  state 
of  mere  potency ;  and  so  far  the  impersonality  of  the  idea 
is  victorious  over  the  titanic  tantalus -like  striving  of  the 
will.  On  the  other  hand,  his  distinctive  contribution  to 
philosophy  is  the  will,  and  the  will  is  always  present  in 
his  thought  as  the  dark  background  of  the  whole  system,  as 
the  beginning  and  the  end  of  all  things.  But  the  system 
is  really  like  a  stream,  witli  eddies  and  pools  and  side  streams; 
art  in  it  is  like  the  water  on  the  surface,  collecting  itself 
together  in  silent  strength  and  potency  before  toppling  over  a 
cataract  or  fall,  or  like  the  water  that  is  dammed  off  into  an 
artificial  channel,  to  flow  over  a  revolving  wheel,  on  which  the 
sunlight  or  the  moonlight  may  play.  In  both  cases  it  will 
get  broken  up  into  countless  myriads  of  particles,  and  will 
join  the  main  current  again,  to  again  form  the  central  flow 
and  the  side  swirl  and  the  eddies ;  while  the  whole  current 
continues  to  move  on,  undergoing  protean  transformations, 
bearing  down  all  obstacles  and  hurling  up  all  sorts  of  things 
from  its  depths,  and  finally  rushing  on  into  the  restless 
boundless  ocean.  Schopenhauer  certainly  gives  us  a  descrip- 
tion of  life  as  it  is,  with  the  ideal  and  the  real,  with  the  calm 

1  Cf.  p.  61. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  283 

and  the  quiet  of  the  saint  and  the  {esthete,  and  the  vnin 
pursuit  of  the  sinner,  and  the  crass  realism  and  naive  faith  of 
the  philistine,  all  mixed  up  together.  Looked  at  broadly,  his 
system  is  just  an  illusionism  woven  out  of  the  many  broad  con- 
trasts in  the  world.  He  is  right  in  thinking  that  art  shows 
man  what  the  world  really  and  ultimately  is,  and  that  it  brings 
this  fact  home  to  his  consciousness.  But  he  is  utterly  unable 
to  tell  man  what  he  is  to  do  with  art,  and  how  he  is  to  obtain 
from  art  the  service  which  it  is  fitted  to  perform.  It  may 
savour  of  a  want  of  appreciation  to  use  the  word  service  about 
art  at  all,  but  there  is  nothing  higher  than  human  life  and 
its  possibilities,  and  Schopenhauer  has  taught  us  to  subor- 
dinate all  things  to  the  one  efibrt  to  live  and  to  perpetuate 
life.  Hegel,  with  one  of  his  reassuring  touches,  suggests  to 
us  somewhere  that  even  the  highest  things  are  also  the  most 
useful  things.  Yet  Schopenhauer  scorns  all  tltought  of  con- 
necting art  with  life. 

(7)  We  may  again  remind  the  reader  of  the  fact  that 
Schopenhauer  uses  (both  consciously  and  unconsciously)  the 
whole  philosophy  of  "  the  universal "  in  thinking  of  the  rela- 
tion of  the  artistic  consciousness  to  the  ordinary  stress  and 
strain  of  life.  His  "  universal,"  as  has  been  said,  is  the 
Platonic  Idea.  But  once  again  the  Idea  may  mean  anything, 
any  mode  of  conceiving  a  thing  in  its  general  as  opposed  to  its 
particular  aspects,  in  its  generality  as  expressive  of  some 
fundamental  aspect  of  reality  (the  fish  as  a  vertebrate,  e.g.)  as 
opposed  to  its  particularity  here  and  now  (this  particular 
fish).  Schopenhauer  unfortunately  grew  up  to  find  his  theory 
of  the  universal  created  for  him  all  at  a  stroke  in  Platonism. 
He  supplemented  that  theory  by  his  happy  reference  to 
the  different  grades  of  life  or  the  different  species  of  natural 
history  (there  was  no  biology  at  the  beginning  of  this  century). 
Still,  he  relied  far  more  upon  intuition  than  upon  objective 


284  Schopenhauer's  system. 

science  to  teach  him  what  the  universal  or  the  Idea  in  things 
really  was.  The  feeling  for  the  universal  he  complacently 
regards  as  a  part  of  the  genius  temperament.  It  is  latent,  he 
is  v/illing  to  concede,  in  all  men,  and  is  hrought  to  birtli  by 
the  vision  of  artistic  objects  and  of  natural  beauty.  He  was 
impressed  by  the  element  of  inexpressibility  or  the  transcen- 
dental character  which  we  feel  to  exist  in  all  real  works  of 
art,  but  he  made  no  attempt  to  think  of  that  in  connection 
with  a  real  scientific  or  philosophical  theory  of  the  universal. 
But  such  a  theory  we  nnist  have  when  we  undertake  to  state 
wliat  art  is,  if  we  would  not  lose  ourselves  in  unintclligibility. 

The  artistic  view  of  an  object  gives,  let  us  say,  the  full 
"  universal,"  the  completest  view  of  an  object  we  can  with  our 
faculties  attain  to.  Nevertheless  art  must  be  set  forth  as 
carrying  all  the  other  views  of  things,  the  common-sense  view 
and  the  scientific  view,  and  the  ethical  and  the  logical,  to  their 
completion  and  fulfilment.  We  do  not  find  this  in  Schopen- 
hauer. He  does  not  relate  art  to  science  at  all,  but  talks  as 
if  the  former  were  altogether  superior  to  the  latter,  above  all 
comparison  with  it.  This  is  why  there  is  such  danger  of 
losing  one's  bearings  in  reading  what  Schopenhauer  says 
about  art.  There  is  too  violent  a  leap  into  another  kind  of 
reality  altogether,  a  fxtTu^aaiq  iiq  aWo  yivoq,  and  if  we  do 
not,  despite  Schopenhauer  himself,  read  some  real  meaning  into 
the  Idea  or  the  universal,  we  shall  lose  ourselves  in  unin- 
telligibility  and  mysticism.  In  Aristotle's  idea  of  art  enabling 
us  to  do  what  nature  has  somehow  failed  to  do,  we  have  already 
seen  the  path  along  which  artistic  reality  may  be  connected 
with  ordinary  reality  and  with  scientific  conceptions. 

Nothing  of  this  must  be  so  construed  as  to  cause  us 
altogether  to  pass  over  Schopenhauer's  idea  that  the  artistic 
consciousness  takes  us  out  of  the  necessity  of  physical  nature 
and  out  of  the  contradictions  of  life.  It  must  be  admitted 
that  in  artistic  and  religious  perception  and  contemplation  we 


■  -I 
"- '1' 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         285 

have  the  consciousness  of  a  spiritual  freedom  and  an  nother- 
like  at-homeness  everywhere  in  reality,  which  is  the  highest 
ertlorescence  of  life,  a  kind  of  salvation  or  exaltedness  in 
which  everything  that  savours  of  bondage,  restriction  and  re- 
straints and  misery,  seems  to  pass  away.  But  what  are  we 
to  think  of  that  disairpcarancc  of  the  distinction  between  the 
"  subject "  and  the  "  object,"  between  "  shadow  "  and  "  sub- 
stance," between  "  appearance  "  and  "  reality,"  which  Schop- 
enhauer defined  to  be  the  essence  of  artistic  contemplation  ? 
If  art  means  the  disappearance  of  all  distinctions,  does  it  not 
come  to  mean  the  extinction  of  consciousness,  and  so  of  all 
meaning  whatsoever  ?  If  art  has  nothing  to  do  with  life,  if  it 
is  purely  a  static  account  of  reality  and  not  a  dynamic  account, 
then  it  is  something  that  we  cannot  at  all  appreciate,  some- 
thing that  is  quite  unreal.  The  rest  and  repose  that  we  find 
in  true  art  and  true  religion  come  from  the  consciousness 
of  having  potentially  attained  to  a  perfection  which  we  in- 
stinctively regard  as  the  end  of  our  being.  It  is  right  to 
emphasise  the  extinction  of  all  feelings  of  pain  and  "  defect " 
that  takes  place  in  the  perception  of  beauty,  provided  we  do 
not  allow  ourselves  to  think  that  with  the  realisation  of  beauty 
in  our  lives  everything  else  has  actually  ceased  to  be.  It  is 
all  very  well  to  feel  with  the  first  modern  discoverers  of  the 
glories  of  Greek  architecture  that  there  is  simply  "  nothing 
to  do  here  but  to  worship,"  but  we  cannot  worship  if  the 
use  of  our  faculties  is  denied  to  us ;  and  Schopenhauer  in 
substance  says  to  the  person  who  wishes  to  appreciate  beauty, 
"You  must  take  away  your  whole  intellect  with  its  tendency 
to  distinguish  and  to  judge  before  you  can  approach  the 
threshold  of  art ! "  If  we  cannot  approach  art  with  our  in- 
tellect, and  if  we  cannot  see,  to  a  certain  extent,  how  artistic 
objects  are  connected  with  all  other  objects,  how  they  bring 
these  objects  in  a  sense  to  their  perfection,  we  cannot  worship 
at  all. 


280  schopknhauer's  system. 

The  universal  and  the  particular  elements  in  artistic  things 
are  too  much  separated  from  each  other  in  Schopenhauer 
from  the  very  beginning.  He  had  evidently  never  fully 
considered  Aristotle's  criticism  of  the  Platonic  Ideas,  which, 
prosaic  and  captious  as  it  sometimes  seems,  has  yet  to  be 
mastered  by  every  student  of  matters  philosophical — iv  roTc 
ti^tm  toXq  aiaOnrolg  ra  voijra  tart}  The  Ideas  have  to  be 
apprehended  in  a  concrete  or  sensuous  setting.  Art  enables 
us  to  see  the  eternal  forms  of  reality  in  the  objects  of  sense, 
in  the  media  of  sense  and  imagination ;  not  in  some  sphere 
wlierein  we  throw  away  all  our  ordinary  or  our  scientiiic 
consciousness  of  things.  Schopenhauer  has  no  definite  philo- 
sophy of  the  "  particular."  He  does  not  tell  us  how  particular 
things  are  organically  related  to  the  universal  element  in 
things.  It  is  true  that  he  tends  to  think,  as  was  remarked 
before,"  that  particular  things  are  not  real  which  do  not  dis- 
charge some  definite  function  or  purpose.  (Art  in  a  sense 
tells  us  what  the  universe  is  trying  to  realise,  but  does  not 
adequately  realise  before  it  comes  to  man,  and  in  man  only 
potentially  and  not  without  his  conscious  co-operation  in 
artistic  and  moral  effort.)  This  dynamic  way  of  looking  at 
particular  tilings  is  healthful  and  sound  as  far  as  it  goes.  It 
is  theoretically  wrong  even  to  ask  how  particular  things  stand 
related  to  their  archetypes  or  their  Ideas  ;  particular  things  and 
Ideas  do  not  exist  "  apart " ;  there  are  no  mere  "  particulars  " 
and  no  mere  "  universals  "  or  Ideas.  Schopenhauer  thought 
there  were  mere  Ideas  existing  as  the  "  immediate  objectivity 
of  the  will,"  and  consequently  taught  that  all  things  other 
than  Ideas  were  unreal  and  illusory.  He  had,  as  it  is  said, 
the  metaphysical  tendency  to  ^vtac«  all  reality  in  the  universal. 
Now  the  mere  universal  is  nothing.     And  moreover  the  uni- 

'  Aristotle,  De  Anima,  iii.  8,  432  a  4. 

-  See  above,  chapter  on  Idealism,  the  close,  in  reference  to  Transcendental 
Idealism. 


sohopenhaukr's  philosophy  of  art.         287 

versnl  element  in  things  is  a  function  or  operative  2yrinciple,  tlie 
idea  of  the  j)urpose  or  function  that  they  discharge  in  the  system 
of  things.  It  may  bo  hard  to  say  where  the  idea  of  the 
"  purpose  "  or  "  end  "  of  different  things  resides — whetlier  in 
the  nund  of  man  or  in  the  mind  of  God ;  but  it  is  still  true 
that  the  reality  of  thinr^s  consists  in  their  function,  in  the  pur- 
pose they  serve :  if  a  thing  fulfils  only  a  temporary  function 
in  the  world,  then  it  is  only  a  temporary  thing ;  and  if  it  fulfils 
a  relatively  permanent  function,  it  is  a  relatively  permanent 
thing.  But  only  conscious  persons  seem  to  be  permanent 
things  or  relatively  permanent  creations  in  the  universe. 
Thus,  on  the  whole,  art  teaches  more  what  nature  is  trying 
to  do  than  what  nature  is  (statically  and  definitely).  Every 
one  who  has  read  either  Heraclitus  or  Darwin,  knows  that 
the  world  is  best  understood  as  an  evolution  of  some  tend- 
ency or  other.  But  in  art  alone  are  we  fully  conscious  of 
the  universe  as  potentially  realised  purpose,  as  a  purpose  that 
is  ever  tending  to  complete  itself. 

All  this  only  brings  out  in  another  way  what  has  already 
been  suggested  about  ontology  being  resolved  by  Schopen- 
hauer into  teleology.  The  universe  has  essentially  attained 
its  end  in  the  case  of  man,  or  in  the  highest  evolution  of 
man's  life,  in  the  spiritualised  and  creative  human  purpose 
that  expresses  itself  in  art  and  morality  and  religion.  Art 
is  best  understood  when  taken  to  be  a  reading  of  man's 
life  and  of  the  perfection  of  man's  life, — of  what  the  ideal 
human  personality  really  is.  This  is  the  outcome  of  Aris- 
totle's theorising  about  poetry,  and  it  is  the  outcome  of  much 
modern  £esthetic  philosophy.  It  is  what  is  exemplified  in  such 
a  piece  of  music  as  Beethoven's  Heroic  Symphony,  and  in 
such  of  Wagner's  musical  efforts  as  are  theoretically  legitimate. 
Schopenhauer's  own  successor,  von  Hartmaun,  treats  of  art 
as  an  evolution,  and  so  did  Hegel,  and  so  does  the  nineteenth 
century    in   general.      "We    are    best    enabled    to    solve    the 


288  Schopenhauer's  system. 

antithesis  between  Classicism  and  Eomanticism  by  viewing 
art  as  an  evolution  which  tends  on  the  one  hand  to  establish 
the  canons  of  its  own  perfection — of  clear  and  definite  and 
finished  expression;  and  on  the  other  to  endlessly  feel  its 
way  into  the  evolving  life  of  the  universe,  as  if  it  cotiid  only 
satisfy  its  own  instinct  by  setting  forth  or  creating  new 
aspects  of  reality.  Wagner,  in  our  own  day,  has  made  music 
practically  co-extensive  with  human  life ;  and  Goethe  and 
Browning  have  done  the  same  thing  for  poetry.  If  Schopen- 
hauer could  have  learned  the  lesson  of  evolutionary  llology 
about  teleology,  his  analysis  of  art  would  not  have  been  so 
static ;  lie  would  not  have  thought  of  the  universal  as 
simply  representing  the  grades  of  the  assertion  of  the  will, 
the  "  species  "  and  "  genera  "  that  were  established  in  definite 
and  rigid  outlines.  Biology  has  taught  us  that  there  is, 
indeed,  a  fundamental,  structural  element  in  every  organism, 
which  is  relatively  permanent,  but  yet  that  even  structure 
itself  and  form — not  to  mention  species — is  undergoing  con- 
stant modification  and  evolution  and  adaptation  to  the  endless 
wants  of  that  mysterious  effort  after  life  which  characterises 
all  animal  beings.  It  has  taught  us,  too,  that  even  species 
are  not  groups  of  beings  whose  limits  in  quantity  and  quality 
can  be  definitely  established,  and  that,  in  short,  the  very 
specific  type  which  all  beings  in  a  certain  group  are  supposed 
to  exhibit  is  constantlj'  undergoing  modification. 

Function,  structure,  type,  the  organic  idea,  species  itself, 
can  be  understood  only  as  the  varying  expression  of  evolving 
life :  these  things  are,  none  of  them,  fixed  and  definite,  stable 
and  rigid.  Greek  art,  the  art  of  finished  form,  is  not  the 
only  art  of  the  world ;  and  we  must  not  forget  that  even 
the  Greek  artists  studied  in  the  PalaBstra  as  well  as  in  the 
studio  —  studied,  that  is,  the  human  form  as  indefinitely 
modifiable  by  training  and  exercise  as  well  as  relatively  fixed 
and  already  perfect.     Modern  scholarship,  too,  has  established 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  289 

the  fact  that  there  are  elements  of  Eomanticism  not  merely 
in  Greek  poetry  but  in  Greek  sculpture ;  that  the  Greeks,  let 
us  say,  thought  of  reality  as  endlessly  transforming  itself. 
Schopenhauer  is  quite  wrong  in  regarding  the  Ideas  of  art,  or 
of  the  different  species  and  grades  of  the  will  to  live,  as  fixed 
and  immovable  and  eternally  complete.  They  are  not  so. 
Artistic  forms  and  artistic  ideas  and  the  various  arts  express 
the  various  efforts  which  the  cosmos  is  making  to  attain  to 
perfect  formal  expression  of  itseii.  It  can  do  this  only  in 
the  case  of  man,  in  the  spiritualised  purpose  and  achievement 
of  man.  All  the  arts  from  architecture  to  music  have  a  bear- 
ing on  the  perfect  development  and  expression  of  human  life, 
Schopenhauer  did  not  give  this  fact  a  place  in  his  system. 
It  is  to  take  altogether  too  quietistic  a  view  of  art  to  think  of 
the  singer  of  a  lyric  as  merely  "  conscious  of  himself  as  the 
subject  of  pure  will-less  knowing,"  or  of  tragedy  as  simply 
"making  manifest  the  strife  of  the  will  with  itself" — the 
"original  sin  of  human  nature,  the  crime  of  existence";  or 
to  think  of  music  as  absolutely  "  independent  of  the  world." 
It  is  human  beings  who  sing  and  struggle  and  express  harmony 
or  rhythmic  movement. 

He  emphasises  altogether  too  strongly  the  difference  be- 
tween artistic  objects  and  ordinary  things.  In  sometimes 
talking  as  if  artistic  beauty  represented  the  only  kind  of 
beauty,  he  forgets  his  own  contention  that  everything  is 
in  a  sense  beautiful.  Beauty  is  neither  entirely  objective 
nor  entirely  subjective:  it  is  a  phenomenon  or  fact  which 
exists  only  in  a  world  where  conscious  life  plays  a  great  part. 
Artistic  beauty  is  a  refinement  and  development  of  natural 
beauty.  Art  does  not  deal  merely  with  pictures  of  reality 
but  with  a  hind  of  reality}     Plants  are  beautiful,  and  so  are 

^  Speaking  of  the  realm  or  kingdom  of  the  beautiful,  Schiller  asks  :  "  Existiert 
aber  audi  ein  solcher  Staat  ilea  schonen  Scheins,  unci  wo  ist  er  zu  finden  ?  Dem 
Bediirfniss  nach  existiert  cr  in  jcder  feingestinmtcn  Scdc   .    .    ."—Loo.  cit. 

T 


290  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  colours  of  birds,  and  even  animals  have  some  sense  of 
beauty ;  and  a  "  mound  of  loose  earth,  if  left  to  itself  in 
the  open  air,"  will  assume  beautiful  shapes  and  forms,  as 
Mr  Euskin  points  out. 

There  is  in  short  objective  beauty,  or  the  beauty  of  things, 
as  well  as  pictorial  beauty,  and  art  is  not  merely  like  the 
"  stage  upon  the  stage "  in  '  Hamlet.'  Of  course  objective 
beauty  is  only  beauty  that  exists  for  some  percipient  being  or 
other.  There  are  various  grades  of  beauty,  and  these  all  shade 
into  each  other  and  form  a  graduated  series,  just  as  reality 
itself  undoubtedly  has  grades — to  use  the  language  of  Schop- 
enhauer himself.  Art  is  "  everywhere  at  home,"  and  art  is 
everywhere  both  subjective  and  objective.  From  idealism  we 
have  learned  never  to  allow  ourselves  to  think  of  a  world 
where  there  is  no  self  or  no  "  subject "  or  no  percipient  being, 
where  there  could  be  an  object  without  a  subject.  Artistic 
reality  thus  represents  a  definite  grade  of  reality,  perhaps 
the  highest  reality,  but  at  least  a  real  phase  of  things.  The 
world  we  know  includes  both  subjective  and  objective  factors, 
and  it  is  in  the  world  which  we  know  that  Deauty  exists. 
Beauty  is  therefore  both  subjective  and  objective.  It  is  the 
chief  thing  that  proclaims  the  fact  that  the  world  is  a  spiritual 
world,  a  world  in  which  conscious  persons  may  really  feel  at 
home  and  expect  to  feel  at  home.  The  power  of  perceiving 
beauty  exists  in  us  by  way  of  latent  capacity,  and  we  can 
develop  it  just  as  we  can  develop  the  moral  perceptions — 
feeble  or  dull  though  they  may  be — that  exist  within  us. 
Just  as  Aristotle  could  not  explain  the  genesis  of  virtue 
otherwise  than  as  the  development,  by  means  of  training,  of 
a  latent  possibility,^  so  art  cannot  be  explained  otherwise 
than  as  the  outcome  of  an  artistic  susceptibility  existing  in 
human  nature  from  the  beginning.  And  this  susceptibility, 
when  taken  in  conjunction  with   the  objective   elements  of 

^  Cf.  tAi  Sh  i,p(rhs  \afi$<f.<'0)X€i>  iffpyi^aavrts  ■Kp6Ttpov. — Etb.  Nic,  ii.  1103  a  31. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  291 

beauty  existing  in  the  world  of  the  senses,  constitutes  an 
ultimate  fact  of  the  universe,  as  real  as  any  other  fact  in  it, 
and  as  impossible  to  expunge  or  remove  from  the  world. 
Beauty  exists  only  for  the  senses,  or  in  some  medium  which 
we  can  actually  and  really  appreciate.  The  imaginative 
world  is  itself  a  differentiation  of  the  real  world,  and  not 
a  mere  "  double "  of  the  real  world,  a  double  which  might 
be  quite  unreal.  Schopenhauer  writes  of  beauty  as  if  it 
needed  no  media  for  its  expression ;  or  at  least  his  tran- 
scendental way  of  talking  about  art  is  apt  to  give  us  this 
impression. 

It  is  wrong  to  dissociate  beauty  too  much  from  reality. 
The  formal  conditions  of  beauty  are  not  merely  non-adapta- 
bility to  purpose  and  necessary  difference  from  anything  that 
we  can  perceive  with  the  senses  or  imagine  or  think,  as 
Schopenhauer's  language  seems  to  suggest.  They  do  not 
indeed  represent  any  kind  of  non-adaptability  or  unintelligi- 
bility ;  they  are  simply  the  conditions  of  formal  expression 
for  the  medium  in  which  we  have  to  work  in  any  given 
art.  The  medium  of  art  in  general  is  partly  sensuous  and 
partly  imaginative.  In  music  there  is  sound ;  in  architecture 
there  is  gravity  and  cohesiveness,  etc.  ;  and  in  painting, 
coloar  and  light.  There  are  formal  scientific  conditions  for 
the  treatment  of  colour  and  sound  and  stone  and  language, 
etc.,  and  the  artist  must  master  these  formal  conditions  so  as 
not  to  sin  against  them ;  still  he  must  not  be  limited  by 
these  mere  conditions,  but  must  be  able  to  treat  his  medium 
freely  and  creatively,  so  as  to  animate  it  with  the  appearance 
of  spiritual  suggestiveness  and  reality  and  expressiveness. 

It  does  not  require  much  reflection  to  realise  that  a  great 
deal  of  speculation  as  to  the  nature  of  beauty  has  turned 
upon  the  idea  of  beauty  as  representing  some  sort  of  adap- 
tability or  conformity  on  the  part  of  beautiful  objects  to 
their  Idea  or  their  end  or  their  purpose.     Neither  Socrates 


292  Schopenhauer's  system. 

nor  Aristotle  could  discuss  or  even  think  of  the  problem  of 
beauty  out  of  all  connection  with  the  idea  of  some  conscious 
or  unconscious  end.  Plato  no  doubt  philosophises  much 
about  the  absolute  character  of  true  beauty,  but  one  rarely  finds 
pieces  of  aesthetic  criticism  among  the  Greeks,  where  the 
notion  of  beauty  as  a  kind  of  adaptation  to  or  expression  of 
purpose  is  entirely  absent.^  Socrates  positively  could  not  think 
of  beauty  save  as  relative  to  purpose,  and  Aristotle  tended  to 
think  of  it  as  such,  of  the  artist  as  somehow  bringing  to  per- 
fection what  nature  herself  had  failed  to  perfect  or  "  to  turn 
off  well."  ^  Even  the  attempt  that  Plato  made  to  extend  his 
notion  of  the  Ideas  so  as  to  include  ordinary  and  mechanical 
things,  such  as  hair  or  filth  or  a  bed,  suggests  that  an  ulti- 
mate philosophy  of  the  Ideas  must  think  both  of  the  Ideas 
themselves,  the  "  universal "  element  in  things,  and  of  artistic 
objects  in  connection  with  purpose  and  fulfilment.  By  a 
thing  realising  its  Idea,  Plato  partly  meant  the  possibility  of 
a  thing  realising  or  not  realising  a  purpose  or  an  Idea  for 
which  it  was  intended.  The  Gods  to  Plato  ^  are  supreme 
workers  or  artists  in  the  sense  that  they  fashion  things  after 
their  eternal  Ideas,.  In  modern  aesthetic,  Kant  discussed  the 
problem  of  beauty  under  the  idea  of  adaptation,  which  is 
half-way  to  the  idea  of  teleology,  and  the  history  of  later 
a3sthetic  theory  seems  to  justify  more  or  less  the  selection  of 
the  point  of  view  of  adaptation  as  a  way  of  judging  of  artistic 
reality.  Goethe  insisted  that  a  creature  was  beautiful  when 
it  reached  the  height  of  its  natural  development,  and  it  does 
seem  as  if  the  attribute  of  perfection  which  we  unconsciously 
attribute  to  all  beautiful  things  is  to  be  traced  to  the  feeling 
that  a  really  beautiful  thing  is  a  perfect  realisation  of  some 
purpose   or  other,  which  seems  to  have  been  imj^lied  in  its 

1  The  celebrated  description  of  the  shield  of  Achilles  (Iliad,  xviii. — e.g.,  line 
549)  is  quite  typical. 

*  Cf.  the  idea  of  the  ZrniiovpySs  in  the  Timccus.     Also  Rep.,  530  A. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         293 

very  existence.     This  idea  exists  in  P6re  Buffier  too,  and  in 
many  others. 

It  is  true  that  the  word  "  purpose  "  is  inadequate  to  express 
the  spontaneity  and  the  freedom  and  the  organic  wholeness 
which  every  beautiful  thing  seems  to  exhibit,  and  in  this  sense 
we  sympatliise  with  Schopenhauer  in  scorning  the  idea  of  pur- 
pose or  utility  or  end  as  applicable  to  artistic  things.  But 
humanity  has  now  definitely  adopted  the  evolutionary  way  of 
looking  at  reality,  a  way  that  is  as  old  as  Greek  thought  and 
Oriental  fancy.  And  thus  we  must  think  of  beauty,  too,  in 
connection  with  the  whole  phi]c»3ophy  of  evolution,  or  of  the 
will.  Although  natural  beauty  is  an  efflorescence  rather  than 
the  result  of  mechanical  contrivance,  it  still  represents  or 
expresses  the  harmonious  adaptation  of  matter  to  creative  and 
organising  form  or  purpose.  In  artistic  beauty  we  are  not 
conscious  of  the  way  in  which  the  result  we  see  has  been 
obtained ;  nor  does  any  artist  produce  his  work  by  a  con- 
scious following  out  of  rules,  or  by  any  rigid  adherence  to 
clearly  defined  purpose.  The  artist  works  in  obedience  to 
the  creative  impulse  which  he  somehow  finds  in  himself,  and 
which  he  cannot  altogether  account  for.  It  was  the  intel- 
lectual dread  which  Schopenhauer  had  of  dragging  down 
artistic  reality  to  the  level  of  the  ordinary  categories  of 
science  and  of  common-sense  that  prevented  him  from  think- 
ing of  art  as  having  anything  to  do,  directly  or  indirectly, 
with  purpose  and  causation.  He  thought  that  "  end "  was 
a  conception  or  category  of  the  pragmatic  intellect,  which  is 
the  slave  of  the  will.  But  then,  as  has  been  suggested,  both 
humanity  at  large  and  the  philosophers  have  decided  that  the 
glory  of  art  lies  just  in  the  fact  of  its  seeming  to  set  forth 
those  ideals  and  purposes  that  we  are  "  toiling  all  our  lives 
to  find."  Art  simply  must  be  explained  in  terms  of  our 
loading  ideas  about  life.  It  carries,  in  short,  all  the  other 
ways  of  explaining  reality  to  their  highest  degree  of  expression. 


294  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Ordinary  reality  always  falls  short  even  of  the  scientific 
idea  of  perfect  reduction  to  law,  but  in  artistic  reality  we  seem 
to  see  reality  expressing  itself  fully  and  completoiy.  In  his 
{esthetic  philosophy  Schopenhauer  was  a  slave  to  the  formalism 
of  Kant.  Kant  was  always  afraid  of  saying  that  things  really 
are  what  we  are  compelled  to  think  them.  He  modestly 
contended  that  our  estimates  of  reality  were  only  subjective 
after  all.  Schopenhauer  had  learned  from  Kant  that  all  the 
principles  and  the  categories  which  we  use  in  explaining 
reality  have  to  do  only  with  our  experience  of  reality.  And 
so,  rather  than  imperil  the  reality  of  the  thing  he  cared  for 
more  than  anything  else  in  the  world,  he  avoided  the  use  of 
any  of  the  ordinary  terms  of  knowledge  in  characterising  or 
describing  art.  Thus  both  philosophers  are  victims  of  one 
and  the  same  error.  What  we  are  covipelled  to  assume  about 
reality  is  true  of  reality.  Our  experience  may  be  and,  on 
the  lines  of  thought  suggested  by  Schopenhauer's  principle  of 
will,  is  the  most  real  thing  in  the  world.^  Ordinary  experi- 
ence, science,  and  art  have  reality,  each  in  its  own  way.  But 
artistic  reality  sums  up  all  reality,  and  all  ordinary  ways  of 
looking  at  reality.  Art  is  a  creation  of  the  spiritualised  will 
that  exists  in  man  and  in  the  world,  of  the  purified  taste  and 
aspiration  of  humanity.^  The  world  is  will,  is  process,  and 
in  art  and  in  beauty  the  world-process  is  brought  to  its  most 
complete  or  consummate  expression,  a  consummation  which 
is  a  conscious  consummation  for  co7iscious  persons.  Hence  it 
is  that  human  beings  may  be  said  to  help  to  make  artistic 
reality ;  this  power  is  a  heritage  that  is  theirs  by  birth,  the 
privilege  of  hringing  reality  to  its  most  complete  development. 
We  have,  in  the  present  century,  the  representatives  of  natural 

*  Cf.  chap,  iii.,  close. 

-  We  have  studieil  the  materialised  (corporeal)  will  of  man  in  chapter  iv.  Tlie 
idealised  will,  which  is  to  infuse  new  meaning  into  the  effort  after  life,  will  be 
studied  in  chapters  vi,  and  vii.  A  creative  impulse  ought  to  control  the  higher 
as  well  as  the  lower  life  of  man. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  295 

science  who  are  prepared  to  demonstrate  to  us  the  utility  of 
beautv  so  far  as  organic  evolution  and  sexual  selection  are 
concerned.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  beauty  is  xiseful,  whether  we 
like  to  think  so  or  not.  We  knoiv  that  it  is  useful  in  helping 
animals  and  human  beings  to  attain  to  a  higher  type  of  life,  to 
realise  perfection  in  different  species  and  types  of  existence. 
Beauty  may  not  be  merely  useful,  but  it  is  at  least  useful. 

(8)  Then,  again,  there  can  be  no  complete  theory  of  beauty 
without  a  theory  of  aesthetic  pleasure,  and  so  far  as  this  goes 
Schopenhauer  is  essentially  found  wanting.  We  have  never 
yet  got  beyond  the  fact,  pointed  out  by  Aristotle,  that  pleasure 
is  simply  the  sense  of  unimpeded  energy.  Artistic  pleasure 
must  therefore  somehow  be  considered  as  a  reflex  of  the  very 
highest  kind  of  activity,  of  the  effort  partly  intellectual  and 
partly  emotional,  to  grasp  the  world  as  a  unity — to  create, 
if  we  will,  the  kind  of  reality  after  which  we  aspire.  The 
pleasure  of  art,  no  doubt,  is  disinterested,  as  Kant  and  many 
others  suggest,  but  it  is  disinterested  just  because  it  is  not 
limited  to  the  consciousness  of  any  merely  particular  or  in- 
ferior achievement  or  design.  It  can  associate  itself  with 
any  object  when  that  object  is  viewed  in  its  universal  rela- 
tions. Aristotle  discussed  Tragedy  as  in  a  manner  quickening 
our  consciousness  of  life,  as  presenting  the  events  and  actions 
of  life  on  some  scale  of  magnitude  and  importance,  and,  through 
the  excitation  in  us  of  pity  and  fear,  relieving  our  most  vital 
feelings  and  bracing  our  system  for  the  normal  work  of  life.^ 
In  short,  the  will  to  live  involves  attainment,  both  conscious 
and  unconscious,  and  resthetic  pleasure  must  somehow  be 
connected  with  the  pleasure  of  living  or  the  highest  pleasures 
of  living.  The  fine  arts  represent  a  graduated  series  of  the 
forms  of  life  which  are  the  inheritance  of  the  human  person- 

'  Cf.  Prof.  Butcher's  note  on  the  different  meanings  of  the  word  Kddaptris. 
— Some  Aspects  of  the  Greek  Genius  (1891),  p.  351. 


296  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ality,  and  which  it  cau  carry  to  still  more  perfect  and  unified 
expression  in  the  case  of  its  own  evolution  if  it  only  has  the 
courage  to  will  artistic  reality  as  part  of  its  own  life.  Artistic 
pleasure,  then,  cannot  be  considered  apart  from  the  evolution 
of  life,  just  as  art  cannot  be  considered  apart  from  artistic 
production.  The  world  has  always  felt  that  art  depends  upon 
the  existence  of  the  artist,  or  upon  the  existence  of  artistic 
feeling  in  the  person  who  seeks  to  appreciate  beautiful  things. 
This  is  why,  when  a  great  artist  dies,  we  feel  that  a  priest  of 
humanity  has  been  lost  to  the  world.  But  as  the  poet  ^ 
reminds  us,  despite  the  endless  idealisation  by  man  of  all  the 
forces  that  animate  nature  and  control  his  own  life,  the  world 
is  "  still  young."  The  high  ideals  of  many  of  the  best  and 
truest  of  men  have  not  yet  become  the  common  heritage 
and  possession  of  all  men.  It  is  only  within  the  present 
century  that  man  has  gained  a  consciousness  of  the  one- 
ness of  all  creation,  and  of  its  infinite  subserviency,  therefore, 
to  the  moral  and  spiritual  aspirations  of  humanity. 

Schopenhauer  considered  art  far  too  little  in  connection 
with  the  theory  of  artistic  production,  and  he  simply  did 
not  come  in  sight  cf  the  view  of  aesthetic  pleasure  as  neces- 
sarily— qua  pleasure — connected  with  the  sense  of  energy 
and  volition,  of  creative  energy.  Aristotle,  with  his  fine 
ethical  and  resthetic  instinct,  associates  art  with  habit,  just 
as  he  associated  virtue  with  habit.  He  says  that  art  is  a 
habit  of  creation  (the  production  of  a  work  or  result)  under 
the  guidance  of  true  reason — 'i^ig  fieTo.  \6yov  aXnOovg  iroitiTiKi'i.' 
He  also  assumes  that  the  man  of  really  cultivated  artistic 
tastes — 6  x"/*'^'? — is  the  ultimate  court  of  appeal  in  matters 
aesthetic.  The  whole  tendency,  that  is,  of  the  best  lesthetic 
reflection  and  criticism,  goes  towards  connecting  art  both 
with   the  artistic  impulse  and  artistic  pleasure — with  some 


'  See  Moms,  '  Epic  of  Hades,'  conclusion  of  the  poem. 
-  Aristotle,  Eth.  Nic,  vi.  4,  1140  a  10. 


Schopenhauer's  philosjphy  of  art.         297 

form,  in  other  words,  of  instinctive  or  conscious  human 
energy.  Natural  beauty  cannot  be  sharply  marked  off  from 
artistic  or  artificial  beauty,  for  all  beauty  is  a  creation ; 
beauty  does  not  exist  for  the  man  who  has  neither  the  artistic 
temperament  nor  the  sense  for  artistic  reality.  Art,  in 
short,  does  not  represent  anything  definite  and  established, 
as  Schopenhauer  tended  to  think,  but  a  kind  of  growing 
reality,  a  kind  of  consciousness  of  things,  which  is  ever  at- 
taining to  a  more  and  more  adequate  expression  of  itself.  It 
is  impossible  to  discuss  the  existence  of  art  apart  from  the 
artistic  impulses,  which  are  a  kind  of  surplus  play  or  reflex 
of  the  sense  for  life  itself,  as  Schiller  saw.  Beauty  is  real 
only  as  the  result  of  appreciative  perception  and  creative 
effort,  and  as  a  realm  of  spiritual  beauty  which  is  a  con- 
scious development  from  the  realm  of  natural  beauty.  It 
is  both  subjective  and  objective,  as  real  as  anything  else  is, 
and  possibly  more  real  as  expressing  the  highest  evolution 
of  reality.  And  because  it  is  a  compact  and  organic  realm 
or  kingdom,  it  is  capable  of  increase  both  from  within  and 
from  without,  from  man  himself  and  from  nature. 

When  Schopenhauer  said  that  the  man  of  genius  is  man 
in  the  highest  degree,  he  was  thinking  of  the  susceptibility 
of  the  man  of  genius,  of  his  being  infinitely  alive  to  all  the 
sides  of  life.  Even  in  this  he  advances  beyond  all  his  own 
statements  which  seem  to  imply  that  the  man  of  genius 
merely  sees  into  life  (having,  so  to  speak,  no  generous  and 
healthy  appreciation  of  action  and  achievement  and  of  the 
evolution  of  human  history).  But  if  he  really  believed  that 
the  man  of  genius  is  a  man  in  the  highest  degree,  how 
could  art  be  to  him  such  a  negative  thing  as  it  apparently 
was,  so  negative  of  all  ordinary  life  and  achievement,  and 
so  unconnected  with  it  ?  The  man  who  is  a  man  in  the 
highest  degree   must  be   potentially  able  to  will  everything 


298  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ill  life,  or  at  least  be  capable  of  understanding  every  aim  and 
impulse  in  life.  If  the  artist,  or  the  man  of  genius,  has  an 
infinite  susceptibility  for  all  life,  how  can  art  be  made  out  to 
consist  in  the  negation  of  life  ?  Humanity  has  decided  that 
evolution  is  unintelligible  apart  from  the  idea  of  end  or 
achievement,  and  so  the  artist  must  be  able  to  feel  and 
appreciate  art  as  shadowing  forth  the  consummation  of 
human  achievement.^  Indeed  genius  and  the  insight  of  art 
can  mean  only  a  power  of  seeing  things  in  the  light  of  their 
true  relations  and  their  true  development  and  complete  ex- 
pression. If  life  consists  in  will  as  Schopenhauer,  with  a 
considerable  show  of  reason  and  truth,  says  it  does,  there  is 
really  as  much  reason  for  admiring  a  genius  of  action  like 
Ctesar  as  for  admiring  a  genius  of  "  insight "  like  da  Vinci, 
or  a  genius  of  "  contemplation "  like  Plato,  or  a  genius  of 
"  religious  insight "  like  Buddlia. 

All  really  fundamental  intuitions  into  things  or  into  per- 
sons depend  in  the  end  upon  a  power  of  divining  their  true 
function  or  end.  Schopenhauer  says  that  a  good  will  is 
"  everything "  in  ethics,  and  "  nothing  "  in  art.  This  may 
be  very  seriously  questioned.  It  would  be  impossible,  for 
example,  for  an  artist  devoid  of  all  good  will  to  portray 
what  is  called  beauty  o^  character,  and  this  may  certainly 
fall  within  the  sphere  of  art.  Is  it  possible,  again,  for  the 
creative  genius  to  know  nothing  about  life  and  yet  to  repre- 
sent it  completely  ?  To  know  about  life  is  to  be  infinitely 
susceptible  to  all  the  aspects  of  life,  to  be  infinitely  capable 
of  living  into  reality.  And  is  not  living  and  sympathetically 
living  into  things  a  matter  of  th„  will  after  all  ?  Have  not 
all  real  artists  felt  in  themselves  the  imperious  necessity  of 

^  Cf.  "  Man  musste  es  zuletzt  am  gerathesten  finden  aus  dan  ganzen  Complex 
dcr  gesicndm  menschlichen  Natur  daa  Sittliche  so  wie  das  Schone  zu  entwickeln," 
quoted  from  Goethe  by  Professor  Mackenzie,  'A  Manual  of  Ethics,'  p.  121. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         299 

experiencing  a  great  deal  of  life  in  order  that  they  might 
feel  themselves  capable  of  giving  adequate  expr'jssion  to  all 
its  aspects  ?  Speaking  of  the  play-impulse  wbicli  he  as- 
sociates so  closely  with  the  jcsthetic  instinct,  Schiller  says 
that  a  man  has  it,  "  only  in  so  far  as  he  is  in  the  complete 
sense  of  the  word  ci  man " — nur,  wo  er  in  voller  Bedeutuny 
dcs  Worts  Mensch  ist.  It  is  doubtless  up  to  a  Cv  rtain  limit 
possible  to  know  things  and  the  life  that  is  in  things,  simply 
through  the  power  of  mere  intellect.  Some  artists  do  this. 
But  there  are  some  things  which  can  only  be  understood, 
as  it  were,  by  being  them,  or  by  becoming  them.  To  knoio 
in  art  we  must  have  the  courage  to  be  artistic,  and  to  put 
ourselves  at  the  point  of  view  of  artistic  production.  And 
it  is  the  same  thing  with  many  experiences  or  aspects  of 
life  —  they  must  be  actually  felt  to  be  understood.  The 
highest  art  is  art  which  is  expressive  of  the  heights  or 
depths  of  human  character.  If  art  is  equal  to  the  expres- 
sion of  this,  it  becomes  an  interpretation  of  human  life,  and 
if  it  is  capable  of  interpreting  human  life,  it  is  implicitly 
capable  ol  interpreting  all  life.  Art  must  not  be  thought 
to  take  us  out  of  reality,  but  only  more  deeply  into  reality. 
Because  Schopenhauer  did  not  make  out  art  to  interpret 
life,  he  very  often  falls  into  extreme  vagueness  of  thought 
and  language  when  describing  artistic  objects.  In  doing  so 
he  is  often — much  though  he  would  dislike  being  told  so 
— in  the  words  of  Heine  about  the  excesses  of  Hegelianism, 
really  echt  deutsch,  romantisch,  verrilckt} 

^  One  often  wonders  why  even  official  German  philosophy  should  not  be 
able  to  incorporate  in  itself,  and  give  the  proper  philosophical  expression  to  a 
great  deal  that  men  like  Heine  and  Voltaire  make  merry  over  in  regard  to  the 
philosophers — in  particular,  their  slowness  to  see  the  inadequacy  to  life  of  even 
the  most  formally  perfect  knowledge.  Schopenhauer  is  one  of  the  very  few 
philosophers  who  are  philosophic  enough  to  see  the  limits  of  philosophy.  These 
of  course,  according  to  the  main  line  of  thought  of  this  book,  are  not  quantita- 
tive but  qualitative.  That  is,  there  are  some  things  which  cannot  be  discovered 
or  detected,  much  less  understood,  bj'  the  mere  idea  or  reason.  ,    .,     _ 


300  Schopenhauer's  system. 

It  is  because  art  is  so  intimately  connected  with  life  that 
we  encounter  such  apparent  exuberance  and  extravagance  in 
the  language  of  those  who  describe  what  they  feel  in  the 
exercise  of  artistic  perception  and  insight.  "  Beauty  is  the 
life  of  love,  apprehending  its  own  ground  and  purpose  in 
the  idea."^  This  language  is  to  be  found  in  such  a  com- 
paratively rational  observer  of  art  as  von  Hartmann.^  It 
is  true  that  beauty  is  in  a  sense  a  kind  of  life,  and  not 
merely  an  efHoresccnce  of  life.  At  leas<-  it  can  be  under- 
stood only  as  the  highest  outcome  of  the  sense  of  life.  Ilcitcr 
ist  die  Kunst !  Now  surely  there  can  be  no  Heitcrkcit  apart 
from  life  or  from  the  sense  of  life.  Schopenhauer's  cold, 
rationalistic,  transcendental  formalism  about  art  indicates  an 
absence  on  his  part  of  a  real,  concrete,  sympathetic  divin- 
ation of  what  art  really  is  and  can  really  profess  to  do.  Is 
it  not  true,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  that  nearly  all  artists  or 
workers  at  art  feel  most  keenly  the  real  organic  and  vital 
connection  that  exists  between  the  creative  feeling  in  art  and 
the  instinct  for  life  and  love  as  the  focus  and  spring  of  all 
life? 

It  is  true  that  the  estimation  of  beauty  according  to  any 
merely  particular  interest  is  in  a  sense  untesthetic,  and  that 
in  this  regard  art  can  be  said  to  have  no  purpose  but  its  own 
perfection.  But  our  only  concorn  is  to  suggest  a  line  of 
reflection  in  which  beauty  may  be  ocen  to  be  real,  to  be 
objective  as  well  as  subjective.  One  way  to  do  this  is  to 
connect  art  or  beauty  with  life  by  making  it  a  real  part  of 
life,  by  making  it  a  real  thing  in  the  world,  a  real  side  of 
existence.  The  vorld  of  beauty  is  a  real  world,  or  at  least 
a  differentiation  or  development  of  the  real  world.     The  per- 

^  Quoted  by  Mr  Bosanquet  from  von  Hartmann's  "^Esthetic  ; "  '  History  of 
.Esthetic,'  p.  628. 

^  Some  of  von  Hartmann's  very  best  work  is  to  be  found  in  his  '  Die  deutsclie 
Asthetik  seit  Kaut.'     His  disciples  admit  this. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.         301 

fectiou  of  art  bespeaks  the  perfection  of  the  development  of 
life.  The  perfection  of  art  is  nothing  but  its  being  able  to 
express  the  infinite  significance  of  life.  There  are  limits  to 
the  extent  to  which  we  may  seek  to  estimate  beauty  solely 
on  its  own  account.  Indeed  there  is  no  such  thing  as  mere 
beauty.  It  is  always  persons  and  things  that  are  Ijcautiful. 
Philosophy  has  to  guard  against  abstractions  in  art  perhaps 
more  than  in  any  other  realm  of  human  knowledge  or  feeling. 
It  is  the  essence  of  art  to  make  the  universal  and  the  abstract 
concrete,  to  reconcile  us  to  the  actual  world  as  really  beautiful 
when  seen  in  the  light  of  the  ideas  that  express  its  life.  Art 
can  reserve  to  itself  only  the  right  to  say  what  the  direction 
of  its  idealisation  of  reality  should  be.  No  one  knows  this 
but  the  artist,  and  we  must  learn  it  from  him — 

"  But  God  has  a  few  of  us  whom  He  whispers  in  the  ear  ; 
The  rest  may  reason  ami  welcome :  'tis  we  musicians  know." 

There  is  a  sense  in  which  even  art  is  never  fully  able  to 
express  its  ideal  of  a  complete  expression  of  life ;  for  expres- 
sion is  qualitativ'8  moro  than  quantitative.  Formally,  no 
doubt,  true  art  is  always  perfect,  but  there  are  no  limits  as 
to  the  "  content "  that  it  may  seek  to  express  or  show  to 
exist  in  things.  The  limits  of  life  are  not  yet  known — it  is 
practically  infinite ;  and  so  it  is  true  that  art  is  really  limited 
by  nothing  save  the  idea  of  its  own  infiniu'  perfection.  The 
world  of  art  is  the  whole  world  carried  infinitely  beyond 
its  present  self,  to  infinite  realisation  and  expressiveness.  It 
is  still,  however,  the  world  and  life,  A  mere  Platonism  or 
idealism  which  does  not  lift  up  the  earth  to  the  clouds,  but 
which  itself  remains  merely  in  the  clouds,  is  nothing  that 
man  can  appreciate.  It  is  "  a  beautiful  and  ineffectual  angel, 
beating  in  the  void  his  luminous  wings  in  vain,"  to  use  the 
words  of  Matthew  Arnold  about  Shelley — if  what  he  said  is 
strictly  true,  which  may  be  questioned,  as  neither  Shelley  nor 


302  Schopenhauer's  system. 

anybody  else  could  create  poetry  which  had  nothing  to  do  with 
life  or  the  real  world.  Art  whicii  disappeared  completely 
into  "  the  universal "  would  be  no  art,  for  it  is  the  essence  of 
art  to  reconcile  the  universal  with  the  particular. 

It  is  hard  to  say  whether  Schopenhauer  is  more  right  or 
wrong  in  his  philosophising  about  art.  He  wanted  to  make 
art  infinitely  real,  and  he  felt  it  to  be  so,  but  he  chose  a  very 
bad  way  of  expressing  what  he  felt.  He  exhibits  the  whole 
philosophy  of  what  has  been  called  the  "  false  "  or  the  "  ab- 
stract "  universal.  He  ought  to  have  brought  art  infinitely 
into  life  instead  of  taking  it  infinitely  oni:  of  life.  And  yet  it 
is  only  an  adequate  realisation  of  his  own  great  principle  of  will 
which  enables  us  to  connect  art  with  life.  Some  Hegelians 
may  think  that  Hegel's  Idea  would  enable  us  to  do  this 
equally  well.  It  does  not,  however,  for  this  one  reason  if 
for  no  other,  that  the  will  has  a  future  before  it  while  the  Idea 
has  none.  The  will  is  always  trying  to  be ;  the  glory  of  the 
idea  in  Hegel's  eyes,  is  that  it  always  is}  So  far  as  human 
life  goes,  the  will  represents  a  truer  way  of  looking  at  it  than 
the  idea.  The  essence  of  human  life  is  that  it  is  an  effort  at 
attainment,  and  so  the  will  is  a  more  fruitful  principle  in  the 
realm  of  art  than  the  mere  idea.  The  history  of  modern 
art  bears  out  this  conclusion.  Modern  art  has  so  often 
shown  an  express  or  implied  contempt  for  what  is  merely 
established  by  way  of  artistic  canon  and  precedent  and  rule, 
and  so  often  sought,  in  "  realism "  or  "  impressionism "  or 
"  naturalism,"  or  through  an  imaginary  acceptance  of  the 
teachings  of  science,^  to  force  its  way  to  the  undisguised 
reality  or   appearance  of  things.     The  true  artist  is  always 

^  The  Idea  or  the  Notion  of  Hegel  is  of  course  different  from  the  Platonic  Idea 
of  Schopenhauer. 

^  I  am  thinking  of  some  Swedish  paintings  (exhibited  at  the  Chicago  Exposi- 
tion) the  idea  of  wliich  was  to  make  things  appear  as  they  ought  to  appear  accord- 
ing to  the  laws  of  optics  and  light. 


SCHOPENHAUER S    PHILOSOPHY    OF   ART.  303 

in  search  of  a  new  motif.  He  realises,  in  other  words,  that 
art  is  always  seeking  to  evolve  a  kind  of  art  that  lies  ahead 
of  us,  and  so  he  is  always  seeking  for  something  in  life  that 
others  have  overlooked,  and  that  he  possibly  may  be  able  to 
find  and  give  expression  to.  But  this  translation  of  the  world 
of  art  into  terms  of  the  will  or  of  the  achievement  which 
seems  to  be  the  essence  of  human  life,  is  a  thing  which 
Schopenhauer  himself  did  not  attempt.  It  will  be  remembered 
that  we  undertook  to  examine  his  views  on  art,  to  see  whether 
art  took  us  out  of  the  bondage  and  the  alleged  misery  of 
ordinary  life.  We  have  now  found  that  art,  instead  of  taking 
us  out  of  life,  rather  takes  us  more  deeply  and  vitally  into 
life. 

By  way  of  drawing  the  foregoing  general  remarks  to  a  con- 
clusion, we  may  perhaps  be  allowed  to  suggest  that  the  Idea 
of  a  thing  is  simply  the  sense  we  have  of  the  totality  of  the 
relations  which  that  thing  sustains  to  the  world  as  a  whole.^ 
Eeality  consists  in  process,  in  function,  and  in  evolution. 
Neither  common -sense,  nor  science,  nor  rational  philosophy 
is  equal  to  the  full  knowledge  or  sense  of  tlie  relations  that 
one  thing  sustains  to  the  rest  of  reality.  Nor  do  all  tliese 
things  taken  together  give  us  a  full  sense  for  reality.  Art  it 
is,  and  art  alone,  which  supplements  and  rounds  off  our  partial 

*  I  say  the  tense  we  have,  &c.,  because  we  perhaps  never  have  an  absolutely 
clear  and  distinct  knowledge  of  the  Idea  (or  "universal"  or  "type"  or  "generic 
qualities,"  or  "notion")  of  a  thing  or  phenomenon.  Let  me  open,  for  example, 
a  statistical  or  scientific  report.  I  read  there :  "  St  Hilaire  says  we  never  see 
a  type ;  it  is  only  in  the  mind.  Broca  says  human  types  have  no  real  existence. 
I  [Lombroso]  acquiesce  in  these  views.  There  is  only  one  question  :  What  is  the 
minimum  of  useful  characteristics  to  which  a  type  can  he  reduced?  The  question 
is  not  answered.  It  depends  upon  the  rigour  which  one  requires  in  a  particular 
case." — 'Abnormal  Man,'  p.  80.  My  suggestion  is  that  science  necessarily  gives 
a  relative  and  incomplete  answer  to  the  question  :  What  is  the  Idea  of  a  thing  ? 
Art  alone  gives  the  complete  answer.  And  yet  Art  must  answer  this  question 
along  the  lines  of  function  and  purpose  and  end.  "  Das  Schiine  allein  (jcniessen 
wir  als  Individuum  und  als  Gattung  zugleich  " — Schiller. 


304  Schopenhauer's  system. 

sense  for  reality.  There  is  an  inexpressible  element  in  any 
one  thing  which  can  only  be  shadowed  forth  for  the  human 
mind  in  imaginative  presentation,  and  it  is  art  that  does  this. 
The  direction  which  the  artistic  idealisation  of  an  object  may 
take  cannot  be  expressed  before  the  creation  of  the  artistic 
representation  of  the  object.  The  artist  divines  the  full 
significance  of  an  object  or  situation  only  because  he  is  gifted 
with  a  sensitiveness  and  subtle  inventiveness  that  are  qaalita- 
tively  superior  to  and  infinitely  more  penetrating  than  the 
knowledge  of  the  scientist  or  the  rational  philosopher.  All 
knowledge  of  things  rests  iipon  a  sense  of  the  relations  things 
sustain  to  our  will,  as  expressive  of  the  highest  purpose  that 
is  apparent  in  the  universe ;  and  the  artistic  sense  is  the 
highest  possible  refinement  of  the  sense  of  life.  Art  must 
never  be  used  to  do  anything  else  than  simply  light  up  the 
infinite  significance  of  all  life  and  of  all  reality.  Schopen- 
hauer's idea  that  art  takes  us  out  of  life  or  makes  us 
desirous  of  negating  life,  is  theoretically  inconceivable  and 
actually  false.  He  urged  this  idea,  as  has  been  suggested, 
out  of  a  desire  to  do  justice  to  the  reality  of  artistic  insight, 
but  his  zeal  for  art  took  a  mistaken  direction.  In  what  he 
wrote  about  art  he  forgot  his  professed  sympathy  for  Locke's 
empirical  philosophy  and  his  contention  that  the  mind  can 
give  out  again  only  what  it  has  already  received  from  percep- 
tion. Art  does  not  go  beyond  experience,  for  it  cannot 
invent  anything  that  is  not  suggested  by  the  real  world.  It 
idealises  the  real,  and  so  seems  to  go  beyond  the  real,  but  it 
is  always  the  real  that  art  idealises. 

In  suggesting  the  limitations  under  which  Schopenhauer's 
theory  of  art  is  conceived,  and  the  reconstruction  which  it 
must  undergo  before  it  can  be  brought  into  real  relation  with 
life,  we  have  indicated  from  yet  another  point  of  view  the 
illusionism  which  characterises  his   whole   system.     In   per- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  art.  305 

feet  fairness  to  Schopenhauer  himself,  his  pessimism  might 
be  summed  up  in  the  contention  that  the  only  thing  that  is 
worth  anything  in  the  world  is  beauty,  and  that  life  is 
inevitably  illusory  because  beauty  can  never  become  a  real 
possession  for  the  individttal  person.  It  cannot  become  so, 
because,  in  the  first  place,  art  deals  with  "  the  universal,"  and 
the  individual  is  confined  or  hemmed  in  by  his  own  particular 
interests ;  and  because,  in  the  second  place,  the  life  of  the  in- 
dividual consists  in  will  and  attainment — beauty,  on  the  con- 
trary, in  statuesque  repose.  Exception  has  been  taken  to 
these  assumptions  both  in  the  case  of  art  and  in  that  of  the 
individual.  It  is  very  strange  that  Schopenhauer,  in  making 
so  much  of  the  sexual  instinct  and  of  the  mere  desire  to 
live  and  to  perpetuate  life,  did  not  connect  our  esthetic 
instincts  more  with  the  fact  of  the  attraction  of  the  sexes 
and  with  the  desire  to  live  endlessly,  and  with  the  creative 
instinct  which  characterises  human  life  and  all  life.^  This 
has  been  done  in  our  own  day  by  metaphysic  and  biology,  by 
psychology  and  aesthetic.  And  of  course  Plato  connected  both 
philosophy  and  art  with  the  creative  instinct  of  man's  mind 
and  life.^ 

^  Cf.  "Breslau  has  painted  a  cheek  so  true  to  nature,  so  perfect,  that  I,  a 
woman  and  a  rival  artist,  felt  like  kissing  it." — Journal  of  Marie  Bashkirtseff, 
p.  178. 

''  Cf.    Symposium,    206   D — "  MoTpo   oZv   Ka\   EiXeifluia    ^    K»\\ovri    cVtj  t>7 


U 


306 


CHAPTER    VIL 

SCHOPENHAUER'S    MORAL    PHILOSOPHY. 

"That  the  world  has  only  a  physical  but  no  moral  significance  is  the 
very  greatest  and  the  most  pernicious  of  errors — the  only  real  perversity 
of  judgment — and  is  at  bottom  that  which  faith  has  personified  as  anti- 
Christ."  1 

"  Only  that  metaphysic  is  really  and  directly  a  support  to  ethics,  which 
is  itself  ethical  in  its  origin,  constructed,  in  fact,  out  of  ethical  material, 
the  will.  For  this  reason  I  could  have  called  my  metaphysic  ethic  with 
much  more  justification  than  Spinoza,  with  whom  the  word  savours  of 
irony — a  sort  of  liu:us  a  non  lucendo,  in  fact,  since  it  is  only  through  soph- 
istry that  he  foists  morality  on  to  a  system  which  has  logically  no  room 
fork"  2 

Schopenhauer's  ethical  philosophy  has  a  peculiar  significance, 
for  the  reason  that  he  thought  the  secret  of  the  world  could 
be  understood  only  in  an  ethical  regard.  His  supreme  principle 
is  indeed  in  name  an  ethical  one,  and  he  meant  to  imply  that 
its  nature  and  its  workings  could  be  understood  only  by  refer- 
ence to  the  principles  which  govern  the  actions  of  man.  The 
metaphysical  meaning  of  the  world  is  for  him  an  ethical 
meaning.  Ontological  philosophy,  whether  scientific  or  meta- 
physical, actually  dissolves  itself  iu  his  hands  into  ethical 
philosophy.  It  was  suggested,  in  the  chapter  on  Idealism, 
that  persons  might  in  the  strictest  sense  be  claimed  to  be  the 
only  existences  in  the  world,  and  that  things  other  than  persons 
have  only  a  borrowed  or  relative  existence — they  do  not  exist 
^  Schopenhauer.  ^  Schop.,  Werke,  iv.  141  ;  U.  d.  Willen  in.  d.  Natur. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  307 

for  thejTiselves,  but  only  for  other  t^hings  or  for  persons. 
Schopenhauer's  idea  that  human  individuality,  like  all  in- 
dividuality, is  an  illusion,  prevented  liiin  from  seeing  this  as 
a  natural  outcome  of  an  evolutionary  philosophy  of  will.  He 
ought  to  have  seen  that  the  real  problem  in  respect  to  the 
personality  of  man  is  just  as  to  how  man  can  conserve  and 
develop  his  conscious  existence  as  already  something  more 
than  a  mere  focus  of  impulses  and  forces.  The  will  attains 
to  its  highest  expression  in  man,  and  it  surely  ought  not 
to  fail  of  reality  just  there.  Yet  we  saw,  in  dealing  with 
Schopenhauer's  theory  of  knowledge,  that  the  danger-point  of 
his  whole  system  lay  in  connection  with  the  reality  of  the  self. 
Knowledge  seemed  to  fail  us  at  the  very  point  where  it 
became  supremely  important — at  the  point,  namely,  where  it 
tended  to  become  self-consciousness :  the  inward  roots  of  our 
being  lay  in  profound  darkness  to  Schopenhauer.  This,  how- 
ever, was  his  own  fault.  He  called  conceptual  knowledge  the 
only  kind  of  knowledge ;  and  certainly  the  knowledge  that  we 
have  of  our  own  personality  is  not  merely  conceptual  know- 
ledge, but  rather  something  more  real — a  kind  of  setise  of  our 
life  as  evolving  will. 

Schopenhauer  may  be  said  to  have  pronounced  the  world 
to  be  illusory,  just  because  it  makes  us  expect  something  in 
the  case  of  the  human  personality — final  and  absolute  exist- 
ence— which  it  fails  to  give  us.  Perhaps  it  was  only  to 
be  expected  that  he  should  find  the  world  or  nature  to  be 
in  itself  insufficient  to  satisfy  the  demands  of  the  human 
will  in  its  desire  for  infinite  existence.  That,  however,  is  not 
our  point  just  now,  but  rather  that  it  is  natural  enough  for 
Schopenhauer  to  hold  that  the  meaning  of  the  world  could 
be  understood  only  in  an  ethical  regard,  since  he  held  will 
to  be  the  essence  of  the  most  characteristic  being  in  the  world 
— man.  We  have  seen  how  he  could  say  that  the  essence 
of  the  world,  whatever  it  might  turn  out  to  be,  was  at  least 


308  Schopenhauer's  system. 

something  which  we  could  not  apprehend  by  knowledge  alone. 
By  the  highest  good  or  the  most  real  thing  in  the  world,  we 
undoubtedly  mean  the  highest  good  or  the  most  real  thing  for 
man.  If  we  only  think  deeply  enough  on  the  matter,  we  shall 
likely  concede  that  the  significance  of  the  world  must  at  least 
be  thought  to  be  ethical.  "  That  the  extreme  point  to  which 
the  significance  of  existence  runs  itself  up  is  the  ethical  is 
evident  from  the  fact  that  on  the  approach  of  death  every 
man's  thoughts,  whether  he  has  adhered  to  religious  dogmas  or 
not,  take  an  ethical  turn,  and  that  he  tries  to  make  up  his 
account  with  his  own  past  life  in  a  moral  regard."  ^  This  no 
one  perhaps  would  care  to  deny.  As  a  matter  of  fact,  the 
ultimate  meaning  of  things  is  a  moral  meaning.  That  Scho- 
penhauer called  his  world  principle  will  is  a  proclamation  of 
this  fact.  Another  way  of  expressing  the  same  thought  is  to 
say  that  ethics  tries  to  give  a  deeper  analysis  of  reality  than 
any  other  of  the  so-called  special  sciences.  Ethics  is  the 
highest  of  all  the  special  sciences,  and  runs  more  inevitably 
than  any  of  them  into  philosophy  proper.  The  method  of 
ethics,  as  a  recent  writer  ^  properly  suggests,  is  in  fact  "  the 
method  of  philosophy  rather  than  that  of  science."  Ethics 
has  to  sift  its  facts  perhaps  more  carefully  than  any  other 
science,  and  is  implicated  in  theory  almost  at  the  outset. 
This  all  means  that  we  cannot  study  ethics  to  much  purpose 
if  we  do  not  feel  that  in  ethics  we  encounter  somehow  the  final 
meaning  of  things,  and  that  a  merely  scientific  method  would 
not  there  be  completely  adequate.  "We  shall  find  that  Scho- 
penhauer's own  treatment  of  ethics  is  almost  wholly  philoso- 
phical or  metaphysical — too  philosophical,  in  fact.  He  does 
not  attach  enough  importance  to  the  scientific  study  of  ethical 
facts  as  such.  This  is  perhaps  natural  enough,  seeing  that  he 
is  before  everything  else  a  philosopher  in  the  grand  old  sense 

^  Schop.,  Werke  ;  Die  beiden  Grundprobleine  der  Ethik,  s,  261. 
-  Professor  James  Seth,  A  Study  of  Ethical  Principles,  p.  21. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  309 

of  the  word — a  man  who  is  trying  to  solve  the  problem  about 
the  essence  of  all  things.  In  his  ethics,  then,  we  come  very 
close  to  his  final  teaching,  though  not  altogetlier  to  it,  because 
Schopenliauer  had  the  courage  to  go  beyond  the  philo,sophy  of 
ethics  into  the  philosophy  of  religion.  We  shall  see  whether 
this  is  or  is  not  a  natural  thing  to  do. 

I.  The  two  greatest  ideas  in  all  philosophy  to  Schopenhauer 
were  the  ideality  of  space  and  time,  and  noumenal  or  trans- 
cendental freedom — both  of  them  achievements  of  Kant.  He 
says  emphatically  in  his  essay  on  the  '  Foundation  of  Morals,' 
published  in  1840  (with  the  words  "Not  crowned  by  the 
Koyal  Danish  Society  of  the  Sciences,"  immediately  under  the 
title,  along  with  another  called  the  '  Essay  on  Freedom,'  which 
had  been  "  Crowned  by  the  Royal  Norwegian  Academy  of  the 
Sciences  "),  that  Kant's  doctrine  of  the  mutual  consistency  and 
compatibility  of  freedom  and  necessity  is  the  greatest  achieve- 
ment of  human  thought.  It  is  this  idea — one  of  the  few 
inevitable  ideas  in  philosophy — which  really  helped  Schopen- 
hauer more  than  any  other  to  the  transcendental  explanation 
of  reality  of  which  we  have  been  in  search  from  the  begin- 
ning ;  and  this  in  spite  of  the  great  length  at  which  "  genius," 
the  "  insight  "  of  art,  and  the  "  insight  "  into  the  Platonic  Ideas 
are  discussed  in  his  philosophy,  and  in  spite  of  the  real  strength 
and  depth  of  his  own  artistic  susceptibility.  Although  what 
Schopenhauer  writes  upon  ethics  is  inferior  in  quantity  and 
quality  to  what  he  writes  upon  art,  it  is  still  ethics  that 
conducts  him  to  the  gate  of  heaven — the  ethical  and  not  the 
intellcctVMl  aspects  of  goodness  and  beauty.  He  worshipped 
goodness  almost  in  spite  of  himself,  and  the  lever  by  which 
he  raises  himself  up  into  the  transcendent  world  from  the 
wilderness  world  in  which  he  thinks  we  live,  is  Kant's  moral 
will  after  all,  just  as  it  was  in  the  case  of  Fichte.  One  does 
not  like  to  say  this  about  Schopenhauer,  because  he  is  in  many 


310  Schopenhauer's  system. 

respects  as  much  a  Greek  or  Platonist  as  a  would-be  literal 
follower  of  Kant.  The  vision  of  the  Ideas  was  indeed  his 
secular  baptism ;  but  it  was  the  good  will  that  he  envied  in 
his  heart,  and  envied  so  much  that  he  proclaimed  the  whole 
world  an  unreality  because  the  good  will  was  never  realised. 
"  Kant  recognises  that  human  action  has  a  significance  trans- 
cending all  the  -possibilities  of  experience,  and  is  therefore  the 
appropriate  bridge  to  what  we  call  the  intelligible  world,  the 
noumenal  world."  ^ 

This  is  one  of  the  dozen  or  so  most  important  sentences  in 
all  Schopenhauer.  He  quotes  Kant's  view  with  all  the  em- 
phasis of  which  he  was  capable,  and  with  all  that  deep 
regret  of  his  that  the  world  should  be  so  blind  to  some  of  the 
greatest  things  in  "  the  greatest  modern  philosopher "  (other 
than  himself,  as  he  would  add).  Now,  unfortunately,  the  mere 
reading  of  this  sentence  suggests  a  difficulty.  How  can  human 
action  be  said  to  have  a  significance  transcending  all  experi- 
ence ?  If  this  means  that  human  action  is  the  thing  in  the 
world  that  transcends  all  other  things  in  imp'^rtance,  then  we 
may  quietly  accept  it.  The  outcome  of  Schopenhauer's  teach- 
ing, in  fact,  is  that  human  action  gives  the  deepest  sort  of  ex- 
perience that  we  can  possibly  have.  It  is  almost  the  outcome 
of  his  system  to  hold  that  by  experience  we  ought  to  mean 
action — action  and  all  that  is  implied  in  action.  By  experi- 
ence philosophers  have  too  often  meant  simply  consciousness 
or  abstract  thought ;  and  it  has  frequently  been  made  a  matter 
of  reproach  to  them  that  they  treated  things  which  other 
people  believed  to  be  facts  as  mere  ideas. 

It  is  a  real  reproach  to  philosophy  that  it  has  since  the  time 
of  Descartes  made  more  of  our  experience  of  ideas  than  of 
our  experience  of  actions.  Action  is  the  supreme  fact  for  the 
ordinary  man,  and  the  ordinary  man  attacks  the  philosopher 
only  when  he  puts  forward  some  belief  which  would  paralyse 

'  Schop.,  Grundlage  der  Moral,  Werke,  iv.  s.  118. 


SCHOPENHAUER  S   MORAL   PHILOSOPHY.  311 

action.  Action  ought  to  be  the  supreme  fact  for  the  philo- 
sopher, because  action — human,  intelligent,  or  motived  action 
— comprises  in  itself  not  only  mere  physical  and  organic  move- 
ment but  feeling  and  knowledge.  It  has  been  one  of  the  direst 
fatalities  for  philosophy  that  a  man's  reflective  doubts  about 
his  actions  have  often  been  considered  more  important  than  his 
actions  themselves.  Actions,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  express  know- 
ledge and  something  more  than  knowledge.  Schopenhauer's 
phrase,  therefore,  about  action  having  a  significance  trans- 
cending experience,  means  simply  that  action  is  transcendingly 
significant.  It  is.  There  ought  to  have  been  a  development 
in  philosophy  from  the  time  of  Descartes,  starting  from  the 
proposition  "  I  act,  therefore  I  am,"  parallel  to  the  line  of 
philosophy  we  are  acquainted  with,  which  started  from  the 
proposition  "  I  think,  therefore  I  am."  It  might,  of  course,  be 
said  that  a  study  of  actions  or  events  is  science,  and  a  study 
of  thought  philosophy ;  and  this  would  do  fairly  well  to  mark 
off  the  three  philosophical  sciences  of  logic,  ethics,  and  aesthetic, 
with  their  ideas  of  the  true,  the  good,  and  the  beautiful,  from 
the  different  physical  sciences.  But  we  are  here  dealing  with 
philosophy  in  the  highest  sense  of  the  word  as  a  general 
systematisation  of  all  knowledge.  As  such,  philosophy  cannot 
afford  to  neglect  action  and  events ;  to  the  highest  philosophy 
action  is  as  much  an  object  of  study  as  thought. 

Is  there,  however,  anything  transcendent  in  human  action, 
anything  that  carries  us  beyond  that  mere  action  itself  ?  Re- 
sponsibility, for  example,  is  often  thought  to  carry  us  beyond 
action  to  something  higher  than  action.  Schopenhauer  dis- 
cards responsibility  because  he  discards  theism,  but  is  there 
any  transcendent  principle  which  is  needed  to  explain  ethics, 
and  if  so,  is  there  in  this  transcendent  principle  a  kind  of 
knowledge  which  enables  us  to  obtain  a  higher  view,  not  only 
of  action  but  of  everything  else  ?  Schopenhauer  accepts  in 
substance  the  dictum  of  Kant,  that  the  only  absolutely  good 


312  Schopenhauer's  system. 

thing  in  the  world  is  a  good  will.  How  the  will  is  to  be 
made  good  (good  in  his  own  sense,  it  is  true)  is  really  the 
problem  of  ethics  for  him.  This  problem  obviously  belongs 
also  in  part  to  the  philosophy  of  religion,  and  the  diificulty  of 
Schopenhauer's  ethics  is  just  this,  that  while  it  has  a  specious 
look  of  being  a  positive  study  of  the  actions  of  man,  it  is  in 
reality  an  Erlumngslehre — a  doctrine  of  salvation.  There  is 
much  danger  in  this,  for  the  metaphysic  of  ethics  or  the 
philosophy  of  religion  ought  not  to  precede  but  to  follow  the 
positive  study  of  ethical  facts ;  it  ought,  in  fact,  to  be  deter- 
mined by  this. 

II.  Nevertheless,  there  is  a  minor  recognition  on  Schopen- 
hauer's part  of  what  he  conceives  to  be  the  positive  facts  of 
conduct.  The  only  way,  he  holds,  to  find  the  basis  of  ethics 
is  the  "  empirical  way," — to  see,  in  fact,  if  we  can  discover 
"  any  actions  to  which  we  ascribe  real  moral  worth."  We 
ought,  then,  to  take  these  actions  as  the  subject-matter  of 
ethics,  and  examine  them  and  analyse  them  into  the  motives 
which  prompted  them.  These  motives,  with  the  susceptibility 
for  them,  would  be  the  actual  basis  of  morality,  and  the  know- 
ledge of  them  would  be  the  supreme  principle  of  morality. 
The  only  actions  to  which  we  do  "  unconditionally  attribute 
moral  value  "  are,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  "  magnanimous 
justice "  p.nd  "  pure  love "  and  "  nobility  of  soul,"  and  these 
things  are  "  one  and  the  same,"  he  adds.  It  is  only  the  possi- 
bility of  "  magnanimity  "  and  "  pure  disinterested  benevolence  " 
as  a  disposition  of  the  will,  that  interests  Schopenhauer  in 
ethical  philosophy.  Isolated  actions  are  to  him  nothing  at 
all ;  it  is  only  the  will  which  is  unconditionally  good  or  un- 
conditionally bad.  This  is  in  the  spirit  of  Kant's  teaching  that 
a  good  will  is  the  one  thing  of  absolute  importance  in  ethics. 

Socrates  and  Kant  were  practically  the  only  two  ethical 
philosophers   of  the   world   to   Schopenhauer^  a.ud  his  views 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.         313 

upon  the  ethical  teaching  of  these  two  men  form  a  natural 
introduction  to  his  own  teaching.  Virtue  to  Socrates  was 
a  "  knowledge  of  the  good."  This  idea,  Schopenhauei  says, 
is  really  "  worse  than  nothing."  What  is  his  meaning  here  ? 
Tu  the  first  place,  by  "  the  good,"  he  says,  we  mean  only 
what  is  relative  to  the  will :  "  good  "  is  the  conformity  of  an 
object  to  any  definite  effort  of  our  will,  such  as  good  eating, 
good  weather,  a  good  weapon,  and  the  like.  Schopenhauer 
agrees  with  Spinoza  in  this,  that  good  is  simply  anything  that 
is  relative  to  any  purpose  that  we  may  happen  to  have.  Good, 
he  says,  is  "  according  to  its  concept "  rtov  trpog  ti,  as  Aris- 
totle said,  among  the  categories  of  "  relative  "  things.  Seeing 
that  everything  that  is  good  is  good  "  for  something,"  an  "  ab- 
solute good "  is  a  contradiction  in  terms.  This  may  sound 
revolutionary,  but  it  is  not  at  all  so  revolutionary  as  it  looks. 
The  notion  of  an  "  absolute  good  "  has  too  long  been  one  of  the 
main  supports  of  philosophical  quietism  and  rationalistic  pan- 
theism. It  is  one  of  the  most  interesting  lines  of  study  in 
Aristotle,  for  instance,  to  see  the  fallacious  way  in  which  he 
is  led  to  close  the  '  Ethics '  with  "  contemplation "  as  the 
"  ultimate  good,"  after  beginning  at  the  outset  with  the  notion 
of  "  a  good  for  man."  And  in  reading  Socrates  we  know  we 
always  stumbled  over  the  question,  "  Good  for  what  ? "  when 
Socrates  said  that  "  virtue  "  was  "  knowledge  "  and  that  know- 
ledge was  knowledge  of  the  good.  Utilitarianism  has  done 
good  in  entering  a  lasting  protest  against  the  conception  of  an 
"  absolute  good."  To  tell  a  man  to  be  absolutely  good  is  really 
to  tell  him  nothing.  An  "  absolute  good  "  is  a  purely  formal 
idea,  and  as  such  highly  unpractical.  Knowledge,  moreover, 
will  never  make  the  will  wholly  good ;  at  least  it  can  never 
alter  the  nature  of  the  will  but  only  its  momentary  direction ; 
it  can  only  make  us  seek  our  happiness  in  a  different  way,  but 
never  make  us  cease  seeking  our  happiness.  To  know  what 
is  good  we  need  to  have  experience.     We  pronounce  that  to 


314  Schopenhauer's  system. 

be  "  good  "  which  has  proved  to  be  good  for  us,  to  be  that 
which  is  in  harmony  with  our  development,  or  our  nature,  or 
our  will.  We  certainly  cannot  know  beforehand  what  is  ab- 
solutely good  for  us,  even  if  we  overlook  the  fact  that  the 
realisation  of  an  absolute  good  would  mean  ceasing  to  be  and 
to  live.  So  if  virtue  is  a  "  knowledge  "  of  "  the  good,"  it  must 
be  of  what  is  relatively  good,  good  for  us.  Because  we  can 
learn  this  only  by  experience,  virtue  is  regarded  by  Aristotle 
as  a  hahit.  The  knowledge  of  the  good,  then,  does  not  seem 
to  elevate  us  above  the  ordinary  plane  of  life.  Indeed  it  was 
suggested  in  the  chapter  on  the  Bondage  of  Man  that  man  is 
unable  to  seek  anything  else  than  simply  the  highest  develop- 
ment of  liis  life.  Most  religions,  and  especially  the  Christian 
religion,  are  very  emphatic  on  this  point ;  and  their  continued 
existence  is  due  to  the  fact  of  their  giving  man  an  analysis  of 
his  nature,  which  before  all  things  refuses  to  flatter  his  imagi- 
nation. Knowledge  of  the  good  in  ordinary  life  means  too, 
unfortunately,  knowledge  of  the  evil  and  of  the  evil  tendencies 
which  exist  in  human  nature.  Virtue  is,  in  short,  if  we  think 
of  it,  a  thing  of  the  will  and  not  of  the  mere  intellect.  No 
ainount  of  knowledge  of  the  good  seems  to  change  the  nature 
of  the  will. 

Seeing,  then,  that  Schopenhauer  regarded  the  possibility  of 
perfectly  magnanimous  and  noble  actions  as  the  problem  of 
ethics,  he  was  right  in  maintaining  this  to  be  an  affair  of 
the  will  and  not  of  the  mere  intellect.  It  was  no  wonder 
that  he  could  not  regard  Socrates  as  having  "  done  any- 
thing "  in  ethics.  The  language  of  Schopenhauer  is  very 
strong,  but  it  is  perfectly  deliberate  and  emphatic — as  de- 
liberate and  emphatic,  indeed,  as  the  language  of  St  Paul 
when  he  talks  of  the  "  righteousness  "  that  is  of  "  the  law." 
No  amount  of  knowledge  of  "  the  good "  will  make  the  will 
"  good,"  or  purge  the  nature  of  man  from  its  original  taint  of 
evil    and    selfishness.      The    knowledge    of    which    Socrates 


.  Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.         315 

talked  could  not  raise  man  out  of  the  bondage  in  which 
Schopenhauer  seemed  to  find  liim ;  it  could  not  make  man 
do  anything  else  than  simply  seek  those  things  which  gratify 
his  own  will.  Schopenhauer  thus  agrees  with  those  who 
can  credit  Socrates  with  teaching  only  an  enlightened  sort 
of  utilitarianism.  Again,  to  say  tiiat  virtue  was  a  "  know- 
ledge of  the  good  "  was  all  very  well  in  its  way  as  showing 
the  strong  faith  of  the  Greek  mind  in  reason  (a  faith  that 
is  found  even  in  Neoplatonism),  but  then  even  Socrates 
himself  could  not  shut  his  eyes  to  the  fact  that  man  often 
knew  what  was  apparently  good  and  often  did  what  was 
apparently  bad.  Being  an  intellectual  man,  Socrates  could 
not  for  his  own  part  see  very  well  how  this  could  be,  but 
he  knew  that  the  fact  was  so  notwithstanding.  I5ut  in  so 
far  as  the  strongest  practical  outcome  of  the  teaching  of 
Socrates  was  the  Stoic  character,  we  may  give  a  practical 
assent  to  Schopenhauer's  conclusion  about  his  ethics.  Mag- 
nanimity of  soul  and  perfect  disinterestedness  and  sympathy 
were  not  qualities  of  soul  that  the  Stoics  exhibited  or  cared 
to  exhibit.  The  Stoic's  attitude  to  both  men  and  gods  was 
one  of  practical  exclusiveness,  not  of  approach.  He  praised 
himself  for  not  being  like  the  imperfect  men  he  saw  every- 
where around,  and  he  considered  that  a  perfectly  wise  man 
was  just  as  necessary  to  Jove  as  Jove  was  to  him.  The 
wise  man,  in  fact,  was  the  ideal  of  the  Stoic  and  not  the 
sympathetic  man,  not  the  man  who  "  loved  his  neighbour 
as  himself."  In  short,  like  all  rationalistic  etliics  or  ethics 
which  is  founded  upon  knowledge  merely,  Stoicism  ended 
in  a  mere  contemplation  of  a  peace  of  mind  which  could 
never  be  realised  in  the  arena  of  life.  The  idea  of  the 
Stoic  being  happy  on  the  rack  in  the  mere  contemplation 
of  his  own  wisdom  is  the  paradoxical  expression  of  this  truth. 
In  it  we  see  the  Socratic  ethics  reduced  to  a  state  of  inward 
contradiction.     Knowledge  of  the  good  really  does  contradict 


316  Schopenhauer's  system. 

itself  so  ffir  as  practical  life  goes.  No  amount  of  knowledge 
prevents  the  wise  man  from  falling  into  the  sins  of  intel- 
lectual exclusiveness  and  neglect  of  his  fellow-men,  or  pre- 
ferring, like  Eabelais,  the  company  of  the  "  most  noble  and 
illustrious  drinkers,  and  you  thrice-precious  profligates,"  ^  to 
that  of  good  citizens  and  honest  men.  Something  like  this 
is  what  Schopenhauer  felt  when  he  said  that  Socrates  did 
next  to  nothing  in  ethics. 

Kant's  moral  system  is  as  easily  passed  over  by  Schopen- 
hauer as  is  the  teaching  of  Socrates.  Reference  has  already 
been  made  to  the  idea  of  the  phenomenal  slavery  of  man 
and  his  transcendental  freedom,  which  Schopenhauer  appreci- 
ates as  part  of  the  "  Copernican  discovery  "  of  Kant.  To  put 
matters  plainly,  it  is,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  part  of 
Kant's  "  immortal  service  to  ethics "  to  have  shown,  and 
in  "  quite  a  special  way,"  that  the  kingdom  of  virtue  is  "  not 
of  this  world."  The  theological  wording  prepares  us  to  see 
how  Schopenhauer's  ethical  system  becomes  (perhaps  uncon- 
sciously on  his  part)  largely  a  philosophical  substitute  for 
the  theology  which  was  discarded  by  eighteenth  -  century 
rationalism  and  nineteenth-century  incipient  natural  science, 
or  dissipated  somewhat  in  men's  minds  by  the  new  spirit 
of  the  nineteenth  century.  He  means  that  Kant's  idea  of 
freedom  and  of  a  realm  of  persons  who  regard  one  another 
as  members  of  a  moral  kingdom,  to  be  treated  always  as 
persons  and  never  as  things,  conducts  us  into  a  region  which 
after  all  is  described  for  us  only  in  negatives  by  Kant  him- 
self. Phenomenally  and  practically  man  was  to  Kant  ne- 
cessitated in  all  his  actions,  while  really  and  noumenally  he 
was  free.  Man  was  free  to  Kant  because  he  had  the  con- 
sciousness in  himself  of  an  absolute  moral  law  which  allowed 
of  no  exemption  and  no  compromise.  This  consciousness  of 
the  moral  law  was  to  Kant  a  sort  of  timeless  or  eternal  fact 
^  Life  of  Gargantua,  Author's  Prologue, 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  317 

of  the  universe,  something  from  which  man  can  no  more  get 
away  than  he  can  from  under  the  eternal  vault  of  heaven — 
"  der  hestirnte  Himmel  iiber  viir  und  das  moralische  Gesctz  in 
mir."  Man  was  free  because  he  could  will  unconditional 
moral  law  ;  the  power  to  be  conscious  of  such  a  lav*'  meant 
somehow  the  power  to  will  it.  There  is  no  need  of  going 
into  detail  as  to  the  peculiar  defects  of  Kant's  ethics.  It  is 
sufficient  to  follow  Schopenhauer  in  the  merest  outline.  He 
is  right  in  suggesting  that  the  way  in  which  Kant  worked 
out  his  conception  of  freedom  (so  far  at  least  as  his  ethical 
writings  go)  is  imperfect.  The  absolute  "  ought "  of  which 
Kant  talked  is  found,  when  examined,  to  be  as  faulty  as  the 
notion  of  an  absolute  "  good."  All  imperatives  or  commands, 
Schopenhauer  reminds  us,  are  hypothetical ;  there  is  no  "  must 
in  general."  Any  given  end  implies  the  performance  of 
certain  means  to  its  attainment ;  that  is  all.  An  absolute 
"  ought "  is  a  contradiction  in  terms — a  "  sceptre  of  wooden 
iron."  All  imperatives  are  obligatory  only  in  view  of  a 
certain  end.  Waiving,  however,  this  general  criticism,  which 
ill  truth  is  assented  to  by  most  students  of  Kant,  let  u& 
mention  another  of  Schopenhauer's  criticisms  on  Kant,  which 
perhaps  warrants  us  in'  passing  over  Kant  as  quickly  as  he 
did  himself. 

The  idea  of  "  ought,"  Schopenhauer  maintains,  is  a  survival 
from  the  theological  morality  of  the  Decalogue.  This  is  cer- 
tainly a  very  bold  and  perhaps  a  somewhat  dogmatic  state- 
ment, but  there  seems  a  great  deal  of  reason  for  admitting  it. 
Kant  had  probably  an  ordinary  knowledge  of  the  average 
Protestantism  of  his  day,  and  he  can  hardly  be  said  to  have 
applied  the  critical  analysis  for  which  he  was  so  famous  to 
his  notion  of  two  selves  in  the  human  person,  a  transcendent 
self  and  a  phenomenal  self.  He  taught,  we  know,  that  the 
noumenal  self  gave  to  the  phenomenal  self  the  idea  of  an 
unconditional  moral  law.     So  much  was  mere  matter  of  asser- 


318  Schopenhauer's  system. 

tion.  But  when  the  idea  of  a  personal  God  was  taken  out  of 
the  consciousness  of  man  by  tlie  pantheistic  philoso])hios  that 
succeeded  Kant's  system  in  (icnnany,  the  soul  of  man  very 
soon  lost  the  double  character  it  had  in  Kant,  and  was  unified 
and  siniplilied  and  iinally  sublimated  into  the  soul  of  the 
universe.  Kant's  introduction  of  "  God,"  at  the  end  of  his 
ethical  system,  is  in  itself  enough  to  prove  that  the  "  cate- 
gorical im{)erative,"  tlie  absolute  "  ought,"  could  not  stand  of 
itself  in  tlie  human  will.  It  is  notorious  that  no  monistic 
philosophy  of  the  universe,  whether  materialistic  or  idealistic 
or  evolutionary,  is  equal  to  the  setting  up  of  a  standard  of 
duty  for  man,  or  at  least  of  an  absolute  standard.  In  fact, 
duti/  is  by  monistic  systems  given  altogether  over  to  the 
vulgar.  Schopenhauer,  as  might  bo  exi>octed,  repudiates  the 
theological  parentage  of  morality  himself,  while  rightly  main- 
taining that  it  exists  in  Kant.  Of  the  being  which  is  simply 
a  "creature,"  he  says,  we  simply  cannot  predicate  an  ought 
at  all.  It  is  meaningless,  he  holds,  to  tell  a  creature  to  bo 
anything  else  than  what  he  is.  Operari,  as  he  puts  it,  follows 
€ssc.  In  this  too  he  is  right,  to  the  extent  that  to  tell  a 
created  being  to  be  something  that  he  is  not — to  be  perfect, 
say — is  meaningless,  unless  the  means  of  becoming  what  is 
prescribed  are  also  accorded  to  him.  However,  all  that  we 
are  concerned  to  suggest  just  now  with  Schopenhauer  is  that 
the  "  ought  "  or  an  "  absolute  imperative  "  cannot  be  predicated 
of  human  nature  without  the  presence  of  supporting  conditions 
or  considerations. 

Kant,  Schopenhauer  concludes,  was  perfectly  right  in  say- 
ing that  the  only  action  which  could  be  properly  called  ethical 
was  action  which  originates  in  a  good  will,  and  not  in  any 
idea  of  consequences,  or  in  any  sort  of  natural  impulse  ;  but 
"  beyond  that  he  did  nothing  in  ethics."  This  means,  to  put 
matters  briefly,  that  everything  in  Kant  depended  upon  the 
idea  of  a  good  will,  while  he  himself  gave  almost  no  account 


SCHOrKNHAUEU's   MORAL    PHILOSOPHY.  319 

of  how  tlic  good  will  could  exist  or  could  be  made  to  exist. 
The  good  will,  indeed,  appeanjd  in  Kant  as  if  "  from  above," 
although,  of  course,  Kant  could  not  allow  himself  to  say  80, 
Nor  could  he  explain  the  good  will  "  from  beneatii,"  as  it  were, 
as  arising  out  of  good  halnt,  as  Aristotle  did.  The  good  will 
in  Kant,  in  short,  comes  neither  from  above  nor  from  beneath. 
Like  Melchisodec,  it  has  luiither  father  nor  mother.  It  is 
verily  as  Schopenhauer  says  ;  we  learn  from  Kant  that  "  the 
kingdom  of  virtue  is  not  of  this  world."  J>ut  how  coidd 
Schopenhauer  commend  him  for  that  reason  ?  The  answer  is, 
only  because  of  his  resting  everything  upon  the  transcendent 
will  or  the  noumenal  will,  wiiich  Schopenhauer  himself  makes 
the  root  of  everything. 

"  Tiie  deeds  and  conduct  of  an  individual  and  of  a  nation 
may  be  very  much  modified  through  dogmas,  example,  and 
custom.  But  in  themselves  all  deeds  yojicra  02Jerata)  are 
merely  c^njdij  forms,  and  otdy  the  disposition  which  leads  to 
them  gives  them  moral  significance.  This  disposition,  how- 
ever, may  l)e  ([uite  the  same  when  its  outward  manifestation 
is  very  diflerent.  With  an  equal  degree  of  wickedness  one 
man  may  die  on  the  wheel  and  another  in  the  bosom  of  his 
family.  It  may  be  the  same  grade  of  wickedness  which 
expresses  itself  in  one  nation  in  the  coarse  characteristics  of 
murder  and  cannibalism,  and  in  another  finely  and  softly  in 
miniature,  in  court  intrigues,  oppressions,  and  delicate  plots  of 
every  kind  ;  the  inner  nature  remains  the  same."  ^  This  idea 
that  all  deeds  are  mere  forms  or  "  empty  pictures,"  as  Schop- 
enhauer somewhere  else  calls  them,  is  fundamental  in  Schop- 
enhauer's ethics.  It  brings  out  what  he  is  always  thinking  of 
— the  will  or  the  inward  disposition.  He  is  at  one  with  the 
fervent  Christian  believer  who  maintains  that  the  centuries 
have  only  shown  that  man  "  cannot  save  himself,"  because  he 
"cannot  change  his  evil  will."  And  yet  people  continue  to 
1  World  as  Will,  &c.,  Eng.  transl.,  i.  477. 


320  Schopenhauer's  system. 

smile  complacently  on  each  other  in  society,  like  so  many 
whited  sepulchres — hypocrites,  all  of  them,  in  the  eyes  of 
Schopenhauer, — utterly  selfish  and  sordid,  like  the  whole  of 
unregenerate  humanity.  The  whole  world  is  sunk  in  wicked- 
ness because  the  form  of  the  will  is  not  perfect,  but  is  simply 
selfish  and  self-seeking. 

So  much  for  Schopenhauer's  views  on  his.  predecessors. 
His  criticism  is  most  summary,  but  it  goes  to  the  root  of  the 
matter.  His  own  ethical  analysis  brings  us  at  once  by  the 
same  kind  of  forced  march  to  the  central  problem  of  the 
metaphysic  of  ethics.  There  are  but  three  fundamental  prin- 
ciples in  all  human  action,  he  maintains :  "  egoism,  which 
seeks  one's  well-being,  and  is  boundless ;  wickedness,  which 
seeks  the  harm  of  another,  and  goes  to  the  utmost  extreme  of 
cruelty ;  and  sympathy,  which  desires  the  welfare  of  others, 
and  rises  to  nobility  and  greatness  of  soul."  ^  The  character 
of  each  person  is,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  a  complete 
assertion  of  the  will  to  live,  and  a  direct  assertion  of  that  will. 
There  is  an  inconsistency,  no  doubt,  between  this  statement 
and  Schopenhauer's  other  statement  that  the  most  direct  mani- 
festation of  the  will  is  the  "  Platonic  Ideas."  One  can  get  out 
of  the  inconsistency  only  by  saying  that  while  in  Schopen- 
hauer's eyes  the  Ideas  are  only  a  quasi  phenomenal  objecti- 
rication  of  will,  character  belongs  to  the  same  identical 
noumenal  reality :  that  is,  in  virtue  of  his  noumenal  or  tran- 
scendental character,  man  is  one  with  the  will  or  the  thing  in 
itself.  It  is  only  the  intellect  that  makes  us  think  that 
different  men  really  are  different  from  each  other ;  in  essence 
they  are  all  one  and  the  same,  a  direct  assertion  of  the  will 
to  live.  Seeing  then,  Schopenhauer  continues,  that  the  char- 
acter of  each  man  is  a  direct  assertion  of  the  will  to  live,  it 
follows  that  boundless  selfishness  or  boundless  self-will  is  the 

*  Schop.,  Grundlage  der  Moral;  Werke,  iv.  210. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  321 

common  characteristic  of  human  nature.  Each  man  is  natur- 
ally the  enemy  of  every  other  man  —  liomo  homini  lupus. 
"  The  formula  of  egoism  is,  '  I  am  different  from  everything 
else ; '  that  of  altruism  is,  '  I  am  the  same  as  all  other 
beings.' "  Every  individual  being  as  such  is  a  being  funda- 
mentally different  from  all  other  beings.^  In  myself  only, 
as  it  were,  does  my  true  being  consist — everything  else  is 
not  I,  and  is  strange  to  me.  It  is  "  this  knov/ledge,  the  truth 
of  which  is  vouched  for  by  Hesh  and  bone,  which  lies  at  the 
bottom  of  all  egoism,  and  whose  true  expression  is  every 
unloving,  unjust,  or  wicked  action."  On  the  contrary,  "  my 
true  inmost  being  exists  in  every  other  being  as  immediately 
as  it  exists  in  my  consciousness  where  it  manifests  itself  to 
me.  This  knowledge,  for  which  the  formula  in  Sanscrit  is 
tat-twam  asi — '  this  thou  art ' — is  that  which  comes  before  us 
as  sympathy,  upon  which  therefore  all  true — i.e.,  unselfish — 
virtue  rests,  and  whose  real  expression  is  in  every  good  deed. 
It  is  this  knowledge  in  most  instances  to  which  every  appeal 
to  mildness,  to  love  of  man,  and  to  sympathy  for  right, 
addresses  itself,  because  such  an  appeal  is  a  reminder  of  the 
sense  in  which  we  are  all  one  and  the  same  being.  Egoism, 
on  the  contrary — i.e.,  envy,  hate,  persecution,  severity,  revenge, 
rejoicing  in  injury,  brutality — appeals  to  that  first  knowledge 
and  assures  itself  with  it.  The  satisfaction  and  the  delight 
which  we  experience  on  even  hearing  of,  or  seeing,  or  best 
of  all,  on  producing  in  ourselves,  a  noble  action,  rests  ulti- 
mately on  the  fact  that  it  makes  us  feel  that  beyond  all  the 
differences  and  the  separate  individuality  of  men  which  the 
principium  individuationis  effects  for  us,  there  lies  a  unity 
which  is  actually  existent,  nay  is  accessible  to  us,  seeing  that 
it  has  really  come  before  our  eyes."  ^ 

It    is    in    painting    human    nature    thus    conceived    that 
Schopenhauer    strains    his    philosophy    to    the    utmost,    and 

^  GruncUage  der  Moral ;  Werke,  iv.  270.  -  ■  »  Ibid.,  271. 


322  Schopenhauer's  system. 

"  paints  the  devil  most  black,"  as  Chamisso  reproached  him 
with  doing.  He  says  that  each  individual  character  is  not 
merely  an  assertion  of  the  will  to  live,  but  is  its  assertion 
whole  and  complete.  A  man  who  wills  his  own  happiness 
wills  for  the  time  being  as  if  he  were  the  whole  world,  or 
as  if  the  whole  world  were  simply  the  horse  on  which 
his  will  rides.^  A  man  would  almost  kill  another  to  get 
grease  for  his  boots,  Schopenhauer  says.  Egoism  has  "  no 
limits."  "  Walter  Scott  speaks  of  the  same  human  inclination 
in  language  as  true  as  it  is  strong :  '  Eevenge  is  the  sweetest 
morsel  to  the  mouth  that  ever  was  cooked  in  heli !'"  ^  When 
we  think  of  this  pursuit  by  the  individual  of  his  own  happi- 
ness in  connection  with  what  Schopenhauer  holds  about  its 
being  impossible  to  satisfy  the  will,  and  about  the  subordinate 
character  of  the  intellect,  and  the  merely  phenomenal  char- 
acter of  the  world  to  the  idealist,  we  can  understand  how  he 
regards  man  in  his  selfishness  as  looking  on  the  whole  world 
as  simply  made  for  himself.  "  Life  is  a  path  of  red-hot  coals, 
with  a  few  cool  places  here  and  there."  "  The  truth  is,  we 
ought  to  be  wretched,  and  we  are  so.  The  chief  source  of 
the  serious  evils  which  affect  men  is  man  himself ;  homo 
homini  lupus.  Whoever  keeps  this  last  fact  clearly  in  view 
beholds  the  world  as  a  hell,  which  surpasses  that  of  Dante 
in  this  respect,  that  one  man  must  be  the  devil  of  another. 
For  this,  one  is  certainly  more  fitted  than  another ;  an  arch- 
fiend, indeed,  more  fitted  than  all  others,  appearing  in  the 
form  of  a  conqueror,  who  places  several  hundred  thousand 
men  opposite  each  other,  and  says  to  them,  '  To  suffer  and  die 
is  your  destiny ;  now  shoot  each  other  with  guns  and  cannons,' 
and  they  do  so."  ^ 

'  Cf.  "  If  I  were  a  goddess,  and  the  whole  universe  were  employed  in  my  ser- 
vice, I  should  find  the  service  badly  rendered." — Journal  of  Marie  Bashkirtsef't, 
p.  157. 

'^  Werke,  vi.  624;  Psychol.  Bemerk.  » 

3  Werke,  vi.  663  ;  H.  and  K.,  iii.  388. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  323 

Schopenhauer's  problem  is  how  to  account  for  social  moral- 
ity on  the  basis  of  this  natural  egoism,  which  he  takes  to 
be  the  truth  about  human  nature.  Obviously  society  can 
exist  only  if  men  take  some  regard  for  the  strivings  and 
feelings  and  wishes  of  their  fellow-men,  and  the  highest  state 
of  society  can  exist  only  if  man  takes  as  much  regard  for 
the  feelings  of  others  as  he  does  for  his  own.  But  how  is 
this  possible  ?  As  Eousseau  says  in  '  Emile,'  "  II  n'est  pas 
dans  le  cojur  humain  de  se  mettre  t\  la  place  des  gens  qui  sont 
plus  heureux  que  nous,  mais  seulement  de  ceux  qui  sont  plus 
h  plaindre."  The  first  step  towards  morality  is  fouud,  accord- 
ing to  Schopenhauer,  in  the  natural  sympathy  that  we  have 
with  the  suffering  of  others.  It  is  in  keeping  with  his  whole 
theory  that  he  holds  that  pain  somehow  affects  us  more  than 
pleasure.  He  notices,  for  example,  that  parents  always  love 
a  deformed  child  more  than  their  other  children :  the  reason 
of  this  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact  that  "  the  contemplation 
of  deformity  or  suffering  tends  to  awaken  sympathy  with 
ourselves  or  with  the  will  to  live."  Now  sympathy,  not 
only  with  the  sorrows  but  with  the  joys  and  the  desires 
and  the  strivings  of  others,  yields  ordinary  moral  conduct. 
The  principle,  therefore,  of  ordinary  civic  morality  to  Schopen- 
hauer is  sympathy.  His  use  of  the  fact  of  sympathy  is 
different  from  that  of  the  English  moralists.  It  is  not  with 
him  a  mere  correlative  to  egoism  as  a  principle  of  conduct, 
but  a  force  which  is  destined  to  destroy  egoism  altogether. 
Nor  is  it  a  power,  such  as  Adam  Smith  conceived  man  to 
possess,  of  placing  ourselves  in  the  situation  of  others  so  as  to 
be  able  to  take  a  disinterested  survey  of  our  own  conduct. 
Nor  yet  is  it  that  highly  reflective  sense  of  conduct  as  a 
balance  of  personal  and  social  affections,  or  as  "  calm,  stable, 
universal  goodwill  to  all,"  of  which  Shaftesbury  and  Hutcheson 
respectively  speak.  Sympathy,  to  Schopenhauer,  is  a  positive 
principle  of  conduct — the  supreme  positive  principle  of  con- 


324  Schopenhauer's  system. 

duct.  It  is  based  upon  the  intellectual  perception  of  the 
identity  of  all  living  and  willing  beings,  and  is  never  really 
infallible  in  its  operation  as  a  principle  until  this  perception 
is  developed  within  the  moral  agent.  But  however  awakened 
— through  metaphysic  or  art  or  divine  grace — sympathy  is  to 
Schopenhauer  the  one  principle  which  makes  moral  conduct 
possible ;  it  alone  causes  us  to  feel  and  act  towards  others  as 
to  ourselves.  The  facts  of  human  nature  being  what  they  are 
to  Schopenhauer,  he  finds  the  only  real  explanation  of  the 
possibility  of  sympathy  in  the  metaphysical  principle  just 
referred  to.  Unfortunately,  there  seems  to  be  something  of 
a  logical  tour  de  force  about  that ; — it  looks  like  an  attempt  to 
save  an  extreme  view  of  human  nature  by  having  recourse  to 
a  highly  abstract  metaphysical  conception  (or  perception).  On 
the  other  hand,  we  may  readily  enough  think  of  his  sympathy 
as  arising  from  the  perception  that  life  is  so  damnable  and 
illusory  that  the  logical  thing  to  do  is  to  get  rid  of  it  alto- 
gether, in  the  case  of  others  as  well  as  of  self. 

Maintaining,  then,  that  sympathy  finally  passes  into  a  pro- 
found feeling  of  the  inutility  of  all  volition,  Schopenhauer 
teaches  that  genuine  goodness  ultimately  means  refraining 
from  all  willing,  a  state  of  the  will  in  which  it  ceases  to 
will.  Ceasing  to  will,  of  course,  on  his  view,  practically 
brings  the  world  to  an  end,  since  will  is  the  essence  of  all 
things.  This  destruction  of  the  world  is  a  consummation 
devoutly  to  be  wished  for  by  the  philosophical  mind,  which 
knows  the  illusoriness  of  all  things.  Genuine  goodness 
belongs  to  the  man  who  has  emancipated  himself  from  the 
will  to  live  and  attained  to  the  will  which,  in  the  phrase- 
ology of  Schopenhauer,  denies  the  personal  will  and  even  the 
social  will,  and  enters  upon  the  service  of  the  will  that 
"  afifirms  the  Ideas."  He  who  no  longer  wills  to  be  any- 
thing for  himself  and  is  content  to  be  what  the  universe  has 
ordained  that  he  should  be,  simply  a  mirror  of  the  essential 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  325 

nature  of  the  world,  loses  his  misery,  according  to  Schop- 
enhauer, and  has  attained  to  true  goodness.  Schopenhauer 
does  not  dwell  much,  as  von  Hartmann  does,  on  the  notion  of 
mankind  becoming  as  a  whole  possibly  so  impenetrated  with 
the  spirit,  firstly,  of  altruism,  and  then  of  the  negation  of  the 
will,  that  they  will  cease  to  will,  and  so  bring  the  world  to  an 
end.  He  rather  believes  that  the  world  will  continue  to  exist 
as  it  is,  because  men  will  always  seek  the  satisfaction  of  their 
own  individual  wills.  Besides,  "  humanity  "  does  not  mean 
very  much  to  Schopenhauer ;  the  race  does  not  mean  much 
more  to  him  than  the  individual ;  it  is  a  mere  appearance,  a 
mere  phenomenon  of  the  will  to  live.  The  whole  world  to 
him  is  just  like  one  gigantic  individual ;  it  is  one  individual 
will  rushing  into  life,  but  life  which  will  always  be  miser- 
able because  the  will  must  ever  continue  to  assert  itself 
anew.  Even  if  the  Ideas  seem  to  be  a  complete  expression 
of  the  will,  they  have  still  to  be  "  asserted "  by  the  will  in 
countless  individuals,  if  a  "  phenomenal "  world  is  to  be  kept 
up  at  all.  Of  course  the  whole  idea  of  bringing  the  world 
to  an  end,  even  in  the  case  of  the  individual,  is  fanciful ; 
it  rests  on  the  false  presupposition  that  dogmatic  idealism 
is  true,  that  the  world  is  simply  a  creation  of  the  brain  or 
the  intellect,  and  that  consequently  it  could  be  negated  with 
the  destruction  of  the  intellect,  or  when  the  individual  in- 
tellect has  ceased  to  exist  as  individual  and  passed  into 
"the  contemplation  of  the  Ideas." 

But  how  does  the  perception  of  the  identity  of  all  willing 
beings  and  the  inutility  of  all  willing  arise  in  the  mind  ? 
Schopenhauer  says  it  comes  instantaneously,  and  his  doctrine 
here  becomes  mystical.  Art  and  genius  and  metaphysic,  he 
holds,  bring  into  the  mind  the  knowledge  that  the  real  world 
is  not  the  world  of  volition  and  of  practical  knowledge,  but 
the  world  of  the  Platonic  Ideas  in  which  the  distinction  of 
self  and  not-self  does  not  exist.     There  are  various  practical 


326  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ways  of  facilitating  the  entry  into  the  mind  of  this  know- 
ledge, such  as  complete  renunciation  of  the  search  after 
pleasure,  voluntary  chastity,  mystic  contemplation,  and  so 
on.  The  saints  of  most  religions  have  learned  the  lesson 
of  the  inutility  of  all  willing  without  an  explicit  knowledge 
of  philosophy ;  but  the  quietude  and  the  resignation  of  the 
saint  can  be  greatly  supplemented  by  the  knowledge  of  the 
philosopher,  that  all  things  are  one  although  they  seem  to 
be  different.  To  Schopenhauer  there  is  much  in  common 
between  the  prevailing  mood  of  the  saint  and  that  of  the 
philosopher.  Both  have  the  constant  sense  of  the  relative 
non-existence  and  the  nugatoriness  of  much  that  ordinary 
men  believe  to  be  real.  We  cannot  help  reflecting  here  that 
it  is  a  pity  that  Schopenhauer  should  have  seen  this  common 
element  in  goodness  and  genius,  and  yet  never  have  made  out 
in  his  theory  of  art  the  real  connection  between  art  and  mor- 
ality and  life  as  a  whole.^  A  good  man,  for  instance,  will 
have  certain  artistic  intuitions  that  a  bad  man  car  not  have, 
and  so  art  may  have  something  to  learn  from  morality,  as 
in  general  art  may  be  said  to  rest  upon  as  complete  an  ex- 
perience of  life  as  can  be  obtained  by  any  man  or  by  all 
men.  But,  to  resume,  the  knowledge  we  require  to  elevate 
us  above  the  ordinary  pursuits  of  life  and  above  ordinary 
knowledge  is,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  that  perception  of 
the  nothingness  of  mere  individuality  and  selfishness  which 
is  implied  in  good  conduct.  Translated  into  other  terms, 
this  means  a  knowledge  of  the  relativity  of  all  principles  of 
the  mere  understanding,  and  of  their  applicability  to  phe- 
nomena only  and  not  to  things  in  themselves.  Things  are 
not  separate  and  individual  according  to  Schopenhauer ;  they 
only  seem  to  be  so,  because  the  understanding  is  forced  to 
break  up  the  world  into  a  congeries  of  separate  things  with 
a  view  to  the  practical  purposes  of  life.     ("  Divide  et  impera," 

1  Cf.  supra,  p.  298.  • 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  327 

Bacon  said.)  "We  are  not  different  from  one  another  al- 
though we  seem  to  be  so ;  we  are  at  bottom  the  same  sub- 
stance that  others  are.  It  is  one  will  that  energises  in  us 
all,  in  all  animals  and  in  all  things.  "  Tat-tivam  asi" — 
"  that  thou  also  art " — is  what  the  individual  may  say  to 
himself  when  engaged  in  the  contemplation  of  another  thing 
or  another  person.  "  Nemincm  Iccde  " — "  hurt  no  one  " — be- 
cause in  hurting  them  you  hurt  yourself.  Schopenhauer  does 
not  advance  to  the  fulfilment  of  the  other  part  of  the  motto, 
"  et  omnes  qtiantum  in  te  potest  juva  " ;  to  assist  others  to  the 
best  of  our  ability  would  mean  in  his  eyes  to  assist  them  to 
live,  which  is  to  prolong  their  misery. 

The  true  way  to  help  people,  Schopenhauer  maintains,  is 
to  show  them  the  inutility  of  all  volition.  Tiie  will  is  in- 
trinsically so  bad  and  so  selfish  that  we  can  become  different 
only  by  ceasing  to  will  altogether.  We  must  become  dead 
to  the  will  to  live,  according  to  Schopenhauer.  As  it  stands, 
this  result  is  manifestly  a  negation  of  the  ethical  problem, 
and  so  Schopenhauer  does  not  seem  to  be  better  off  himself 
than  he  thought  Socrates  and  Kant  to  be.  Still  the  honesty 
of  a  non  ijossumus  is  in  his  eyes  superior  to  compromise. 
"  The  kingdom  of  virtue  is  not  of  this  world."  "  Aid  salus, 
aut  nihil,"  is  the  sum  and  substance  of  his  thought.  "When 
we  negate  the  finite  will  we  are  supposed  by  Schopenhauer 
to  affirm  the  Ideas ;  in  fact  we  negate  the  finite  will  by 
"  affirming  the  Ideas."  In  "  affirming  the  Ideas  "  we  become 
timeless  and  eternal.  "When  we  ask  what  this  means,  the 
most  direct  answer  from  Schopenhauer  would  be,  "  Look  at 
the  complete  rest  on  the  faces  of  the  greatest  artistic  crea- 
tions ;  realise  the  stigmata  of  the  Christian  ascetics  and 
saints ;  breathe  the  lotus-like  air  of  the  Hindoo  scriptures ; 
seek  in  any  way  you  can  ceternam  qtiietcm."  "Were  we  to 
rejoin  that  this  is  just  as  inexplicable  as  Kant's  noumenal 
or  transcendental  freedom,  Schopenhauer  would  repeat  that 


328  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Kant's  merit  lies  just  in  showing  that  the  "  kingdom  of  virtue 
is  not  of  this  world ; "  "  I,  the  only  other  modern  philosopher, 
agree  with  Kant  in  this  matter,"  as  it  were.  Virtue  lies 
only  in  the  will  which  affirms  the  Ideas.  It  must  be  con- 
fessed that  the  result  of  aflirming  the  Ideas  is  not  so  very 
different  in  Schopenhauer  from  what  it  is  in  Hegel.  In  both 
salvation  seems  to  lie  simply  in  the  contemplation  of  the 
eternal  Ideas  or  the  eternal  order  of  the  world,  and  salvation 
in  both  instances  seems  to  involve  the  loss  of  individual 
or  separate  existence.  There  is  this  slight  difference  in  the 
case  of  Schopenhauer,  that  he  maintains  salvation  to  be  an 
affair  not  so  much  of  the  intellect  as  of  the  will :  whatever 
else  salvation  may  be,  it  must  mean  to  him  a  changed  atti- 
tude of  the  will,  and  if  the  finite  will  can  be  changed  only 
by  death,  then  death  must  somehow  lie  on  the  path  to  salva- 
tion. This  is  a  wholesome  reminder.  Eeality,  we  shall  later 
see,  has  more  to  do  with  the  will  than  is  often  recognised. 
Here  at  least,  in  ethics,  the  will  is  the  main  thing,  because 
virtue  has  far  more  to  do  with  the  will  than  with  the  in- 
tellect. It  is  a  habit  of  the  will  according  to  Aristotle  and 
according  to  common-sense.  The  Hegelians  all  make  virtue 
far  too  intellectual  a  matter,  just  as  Spinoza  did. 

In  this  affirmation  of  the  Ideas  by  the  benevolent  or 
virtuous  will  we  have  reached  the  supreme  meaning  of  reality 
according  to  Schopenhauer,  the  true  transcendental  meaning  of 
reality  of  which  we  have  been,  directly  and  indirectly,  in 
search  throughout.  In  the  noumenal  will,  and  in  the  sub- 
mission of  the  finite  will  to  the  will  that  affirms  the  Ideas, 
Schopenhauer  as  well  as  Fichte  finds  the  highest  reality  or 
the  highest  phase  of  reality.  As  he  said,  it  was  Kant's  idea 
of  noumenal  freedom  which  led  him  to  this  discovery. 

III.  The  ethical  student  will  certainly  feel  at  this  point 
that  it  is  time  he  is  allowed  to  pause,  after  refraining  from 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.         329 

criticism  so  long.  The  path  wo  have  traversed  is  strewn  with 
fnllaeies.  The  only  assumption  that  at  all  justifies  Schopen- 
hauer's unparalleled  haste  in  generalisation,  is  that  the  meta- 
physic  of  ethics  is  the  only  thing  wortli  caring  about  in  ethics, 
or  at  least  the  fact  of  the  inner  contradiction  between  the 
merely  personal  and  the  altruistic  or  perfectly  moral  will. 
Now  the  metaphysic  of  ethics  is  doubtless  the  highest  thing 
in  ethics,  but  it  is  not  the  only  thing.  There  must  be  in 
every  etliical  philosophy  an  adequate  recognition  of  the  con- 
crete facts  of  the  ethical  consciousness.  In  this  regard  Scho- 
penhauer is  a  supreme  sinner.  It  was  perfectly  natural  that 
the  Danish  Academy  did  not  crown  his  essay  on  '  The  Foun- 
dation of  Morals.'  Sympathy  is  certainly  not  the  whole  of 
morality,  nor  is  it  even  the  supreme  principle  of  morality.  It  is 
a  good  deal  to  Schopenhauer,  because  the  first  thing  we  ought, 
according  to  his  way  of  thinking,  to  perceive  about  the  world 
is  that  it  is  illusory.  Consequently  we  ought  to  regard  "  all 
men  as  the  victims  along  with  ourselves  of  an  illusion  even 
in  the  ordinary  perceptions  of  the  senses.^  We  ought  not  to 
address  men  as  comrades — Good  Sir,  Monsieur — but  as  fellow- 
sufferers — socii  malorum."  Unfortunately  we  have  been  com- 
pelled to  deny  the  illusoriness  that  Schopenhauer  attributes  to 
sense-perception  and  to  all  knowledge. 

Schopenhauer  makes  no  attempt  to  explain  in  an  unpre- 
judiced and  positive  way  the  very  first  things  that  we  have 
a  right  to  expect  an  explanation  of  in  ethics,  the  ideas  of  duty 
and  obligation.  These  ideas  ought  to  be  put  in  the  forefront 
of  any  ethical  theory,  to  be  at  least  explained  or  criticised,  if 
not  finally  accepted.  Ethics  differs  from  positive  science  in 
describing  or  in  explaining  "  what  ought  to  be,"  rather  than 
what "  is."  Most  of  the  great  German  idealists  attempted  to 
give  some  account  of  the  eternal  Sollen  that  they  all  felt  to 
be  somehow  deeply  imbedded  in  the  moral  consciousness  of 

>■:  :  '  ^  Cf.  chap,  ii.,  section  ii.  et  passim. 


330  Schopenhauer's  system. 

mankind.  Again,  under  the  name  of  characteristic  ethical 
facts,  Schopenhauer  selected  not  so  much  activities  as  passive 
states  of  mind.  Without  doubt  there  is  a  savour  of  fairness 
in  his  proposition  to  examine,  as  the  subject-matter  of  ethics, 
those  actions  or  states  of  mind  which  all  men  unconditionally 
approve.  We  are  reminded  of  Hume,  whose  ethical  inquiry 
was  also  undertaken  in  regard  to  the  generally  approved 
qualities  of  human  nature.  Still  one  could  never  feel,  even 
in  Hume's  case,  that  the  fact  of  certain  qualities  being  pleas- 
ing to  men  and  certain  others  being  displeasing,  was  a  sufficient 
explanation  of  what  we  call  right  and  wrong  in  actions ;  and 
the  case  is  similar  in  Schopenhauer.  It  is  the  ethical  standard, 
and  the  consciousness  which  both  the  agent  and  the  spectator 
of  ethical  action  have  of  that  standard,  that  are  the  char- 
acteristic facts  of  ethics.  In  approaching  the  study  of  ethics, 
the  point  of  view  of  the  ethical  agent  must  be  taken  into 
account  even  more  than  that  of  the  ethical  spectator.  If  this 
is  not  done  we  are  apt  to  bring  forward  an  apparently  uncon- 
scious basis  of  ethics,  as  both  Hume  and  Schopenhauer  to  a 
certain  extent  do.  We  are  apt  to  talk  as  if  the  agent  simply 
might  or  might  not  happen  to  act  morally,  might  or  might 
not  exhibit  those  qualities  which  we  call  moral.  Both  Scho- 
penhauer and  Hume  seem  to  start  with  the  purely  inductive 
method  in  ethics,  and  there  is  something  commendable  in  this. 
But  we  cannot  very  well  seek  for  ethical  facts  if  we  have  not 
already  in  our  minds  some  standard  or  other  of  what  is  or  is 
not  ethical.  Those  facts,  we  know,  are  economic  which  have 
some  bearing  on  the  production  or  the  distribution  of  wealth ; 
and,  similarly,  those  facts  are  ethical  which  have  some  bearing 
on  the  performance  or  non-performance  of  what  is  called  duty. 
Schopenhauer,  in  short,  cannot  be  regarded  as  having  started 
from  the  characteristic  facts  of  ethics. 

Benevolence  and  sympathy  are  obviously  a  very  small  part 
of  ethics ;  a  person  might  even  be  benevolent  and  sympathetic 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  331 

without  knowing  much  about  duty  and  without  acting  dutifully. 
Schopenhauer's  partly  morbid  account  of  the  origin  of  sym- 
pathy, as  arising  chiefly  from  the  perception  of  suffering,  is  of 
itself  sufficient  to  show  this.  We  must  be  able  to  sympathise 
with  the  upward  eiforts  of  mankind  as  well  as  with  their 
tendency  to  suffer  and  to  act  imperfectly.  "We  must  have 
sympathy  for  the  performance  of  duty  as  well  as  for  the  non- 
performance of  duty  by  mankind.  Sympathy,  so  to  speak,  is 
a  secondary  principle  of  ethics,  and  rests  upon  some  implied 
perception  of  what  is  worth  sympathising  with  in  man.  One 
cannot  help  remarking  in  passing,  that  if  Schopenhauer  had 
felt  the  reality  of  duty  as  Kant  did,  or  as  Schiller  did,  or  as 
Carlyle  did,  it  might  have  made  life  less  illusory  for  him  and 
more  real.  His  Diogenes-like  finding  of  all  men  to  be  rogues 
and  devils  and  cheats,  might  then  have  had  in  his  mind  for 
its  obverse  a  perception  that  man  could  be  real  and  heroic 
when  obeying  the  call  of  duty.  The  very  underived  and 
ultimate  character  that  moral  obligation  seems  to  have  in 
Kant  infuses  a  reality  and  a  meaning  into  life  which  causes 
sceptical  and  agnostic  prejudices  to  dry  up  and  wither  away. 
In  the  idea  of  duty  we  do  seem  to  find  some  stable  ground 
in  this  world  of  fleeting  things.  "Wordsworth  found  that  the 
"  ancient  heavens  "  were  "  fresh  and  strong  "  through  the  idea 
of  "  duty,"  the  "  stern  daughter  of  the  voice  of  God."  There 
is  little  that  is  noble  in  Schopenhauer,  although  there  is  much 
that  is  beautiful  and  pathetic,  as  we  have  seen.  And  perhaps 
the  way  in  which  he  ignores  the  idea  of  duty  is  to  some  extent 
responsible  for  this.  The  beautiful,  we  found,  was  for  Scho- 
penhauer not  something  that  man  was  called  upon  to  attain 
to  or  to  realise  in  his  life,  but  rather  something  that  called 
him  out  of  the  world  and  away  from  it.  In  some  respects 
nothing  strikes  us  as  more  strange  in  Schopenhauer  than  that 
he  did  not  realise  the  full  significance  of  his  own  teaching  that 
the  reality  of  man  and  of  all  other  things  is  will.     If  man 


332  Schopenhauer's  system. 

really  is  will,  attainment  ought  to  be  the  key-note  of  his  life. 
The  reason  of  its  not  being  such  in  Schopenhauer  is,  once 
more,  that  the  will  with  which  he  deals  from  first  to  last  is 
not  the  reasonable  will,  which  the  will  of  man  undoubtedly  is, 
but  the  unconscious  will  that  we  think  of  as  mere  impulse 
and  (blind)  effort.  He  thus  came  to  think  of  will  as  that 
which  indicated,  in  the  first  instance,  an  absence  of  reason, 
something  that  was  different  from  reason  and  opposed  to  it. 
He  failed  to  see  how  instinct,  when  properly  understood,  may 
be  viewed  as  organised  or  unconscious  reason.^ 

It  was  but  sorry  justice  at  best  that  Schopenhauer  did 
to  the  ethics  of  Socrates  and  Kant.  The  idea  of  Socrates 
that  virtue  was  knowledge,  contains  very  much  more  than 
Schopenhauer  saw  in  it.  It  stands  at  least  for  the  fact  that 
man  is  a  being  who  must  have  a  reason  for  his  conduct,  who 
must  always  act  intelligently,  with  full  consciousness  of  what 
he  is  doing — the  very  thing  that  Schopenhauer  overlooked  in 
seeming  to  explain  conduct  out  of  that  which  was  largely 
unconscious.  It  is  perhaps,  however,  needless  to  repeat  here 
what  was  suggested  in  the  chapter  on  the  Bondage  of  Man, 
about  the  inadequate  recognition  that  Schopenhauer  gives  to 
the  conception  or  the  idea.  It  was  perfectly  natural  that  he 
could  not  fully  sympathise  with  Socrates,  who  placed  the 
essence  of  virtue  in  a  conception  or  knowledge  of  what  was 
good.  His  feeling  about  Kant  was  doubtless  in  the  main 
correct,  that  there  is  no  such  thing  as  an  imperative  in  gen- 
eral which  can  maintain  itself  to  be  a  law  to  man  without 
any  supporting  conditions  whatsoever.  But,  then,  there  are 
the  many  concrete  duties  of  life,  and  to  these  Schopenhauer 
paid  little  attention.  From  the  days  of  childhood  onwards 
men  are  subjected  to  the  thousand  and  one  demands  of  tne 

'  It  is  an  outcome  of  chapters  v.  and  vi.  that  the  natural  creative  impulse  of 
our  lives  may  be  rationalised  througli  a  desire  to  create  the  highest  forms  of 
beauty. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  333 

various  institutions  and  relations  and  conventions  of  civilised 
life.  No  one  of  these  demands  in  itself  exactly  explains  the 
fact  of  obligation  or  duty,  but,  taken  together,  they  all  of  them 
imply  it ;  yet  of  none  of  them  did  Schopenhauer  take  any 
account  in  thinkinp;  out  his  philosophy  of  conduct.  Apart 
from  his  want  of  perception  of  the  importance  of  the  general 
idea  of  duty  to  the  philosopher,  there  is  this  utter  want  of 
perception  on  his  part  of  the  extent  to  which  man  is  helped 
along  the  highway  of  life  by  the  institutions  and  arrangements 
of  society,  and  by  custom  even,  by  usage,  by  civic  and  common 
duty. 

Schopenhauer  has  very  little  sense  for  the  midway  region 
in  morals,  the  plain  broad  highway  of  life  on  which  ordinary 
ethical  actions  are  exhibited.  The  ethical  man  is  neither  a 
beast  nor  a  god,  but  a  plain  being  exhibiting  rarely  the 
extremes  of  "  excess "  and  "  defect."  It  was  mainly  the 
"  excess  "  and  the  "  defect  "  in  life  that  Schopenhauer  saw,  and 
consequently  he  had  not  the  first  prerequisites  of  the  dis- 
passionate and  unprejudiced  and  appreciative  ethical  observer. 
Like  Machiavelli,  he  could  not  see  the  guiding  and  restraining 
power  of  the  media  axiomata  of  life ;  he  could  only  figure  to 
himself  the  workings  of  perfect  goodness  or  perfect  badness. 
He  had  no  sympathy  for  such  a  representation  of  life  as  is 
giv^n  in  a  poem  like  Goldsmith's  "  Deserted  Village,"  with  its 
lingering  lovb  for  such  things  as  "  contented  toil "  and  "  hos- 
pitable care  "  and  "  steady  loyalty "  and  "  kind,  connubial 
tenderness."  He  had  too  much  hatred  for  compromise  and 
toleration,  and  again  for  the  infiuence  of  priesthoods  and 
father-confessors  over  mankind,  to  have  any  sympathy  with 
the  helplessness  of  the  average  man.^  He  was  incapable  of 
appreciating  the  contentment  that  comes  to  ordinary  people 

'  Schopenhauer  had  the  regular  Continental  contempt  for  Vhypocrisic  Anglaiae, 
the  extent  to  which  many  of  us  lay  atress  on  a  pseudo-conformity  to  external 
standards  of  religion  and  social  conduct. 


334  Schopenhauer's  system. 

from  the  simple  discharge  of  duty,  and  from  simple  partici- 
pation in  the  ordinary  delights  of  life.  He  would  have 
scorned  as  utterly  beneath  his  notice  such  blissful  content- 
ment as  Jean  Paul  represents  in  his  schoolmaster  "  Wuz " 
or  in  his  "  Fixlein."  He  had  no  real  inward  feeling  for  the 
ethical  value  of  the  Greek  idea  of  the  "  limit "  in  things,  or 
of  their  maxim  /uijSlv  ayav,  or  of  Aristotle's  idea  of  virtue  as 
a  "  mean "  between  two  extremes.^  Nor  had  he  any  sym- 
pathy for  the  insignificant  pursuits  of  insignificant  people  or 
the  innocent  sat^isf action  of  humble  wants.  He  saw  only  the 
extremes  in  life,  like  Nero  having  Seneca  for  a  tutor,  or  the 
stupid  Germans  trying  to  shake  a  man  like  Napoleon  off  their 
shoulders,  or  the  fact  that  the  French,  although  the  most  gay 
and  most  superficial  and  the  most  consummately  mundane  of 
all  peoples,  lipve  yet  given  birth  to  the  strictest  and  the 
severest  religious  order,  the  La  Trappe  monks.  It  is  astound- 
ing to  think  how  he  could,  although  by  his  own  profession  a 
"  man  of  the  world  "  who  pretended  to  know  men  as  they  are, 
maintain  all  human  actions  to  be  the  outcome  of  simply  three 
motives — selfishness,  wickedness,  and  benevolence.  There  is 
the  mere  student  and  the  hardened  bachelor  and  the  soured 
observer  of  human  life  in  a  great  deal  that  he  writes  upou 
ethics. 

We  must  remember,  of  course,  that  our  philosopher  grew 
up  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  at  a  time  when 
individualism  had  run  riot,  and  when  the  wayward  self  had 
expressed  its  infinite  willingness  to  "  govern "  but  not  to 
"  obey."  With  the  cynical  and  the  selfish  moralists,  and  with 
some  of  the  early  founders  of  the  science  of  political  economy, 
he  thought  of  man  as  always  seeking  merely  his  own  happi- 
ness or  advantage.  People,  in  his  eyes,  are  simply  seeking  to 
be  happy,  and  to  eat  and  drink  and  multiply  their  numbers,  as 

1  Nay,  he  objected  to  this  very  idea.     "  Aristotle's  principle,  to  oljserve  the 
mean  in  all  things,  ia  very  ill  adapted  to  become  a  principle  of  morals." 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  335 

they  have  done  since  the  beginning  of  history.  "  What  the 
will  aims  at  and  effects  in  man,  is  essentially  just  the  same 
as  what  it  aims  at  in  the  case  of  the  lower  animals — nutrition 
and  propagation."  ^  His  sense  for  the  evil  that  he  found  in 
man  probably  came  to  him,  partly  through  his  own  strangely 
passionate  and  uncontrollable  nature,  and  partly  from  modern 
evolutionary  science  with  its  doctrine  of  the  animality  of  man, 
and  partly  from  the  Protestant  and  Catholic  doctrine  of  the 
original  depravity  of  human  nature.  It  undoubtedly  requires 
a  great  man  to  be  fundamental  in  his  views,  but  to  be  a  good 
moralist  a  man  must  be  able,  through  delicacy  and  tact  and 
insight,  to  judge  of  conduct  as  a  whole,  as  in  some  sense  an 
art,  a  kind  cf  harmony  established  between  the  purely  im- 
pulsive and  the  purely  rational  or  benevolent  or  aesthetic 
forces  in  man's  nature.  The  only  man  that  Schopenhauer 
unconditionally  respected  was  the  merchant,  of  whom  he  had 
a  good  type  before  his  eyes — the  old  Hansa  merchant  with 
his  spirit  of  enterprise  and  daring,  and  his  own  father  with 
his  high  notions  of  commercial  and  political  honour.  He  held 
that  all  men  were  rogues,  but  that  the  merchant  was  the  only 
man  who  had  the  courage  to  say  so,  and  to  act  upon  the 
truth  of  his  statement.  For  the  soldier,  the  hero,  and  the 
great  statesman,  Schopenhauer  had  no  admiration  at  all ;  as 
a  class  these  men  simply  exemplified  to  his  mind  different 
ways  in  which  the  great  vulgar  mob  that  is  called  humanity 
is  schooled  into  some  sort  of  order  for  a  given  time.  By  far 
the  greater  number  of  human  actions  seemed  to  him  merely 
conventional ;  and  the  question  of  men  like  Holbach  and 
Helvetius  and  D'Alembert,  whether  all  justice  and  honesty 
were  not  conventional  too,  seemed  to  him  far  from  out  of  the 
way.  They  probably  were  so,  in  his  eyes,  for  the  general 
reason  that  men  do  not  really  knoiu  what  they  say  about  their 
actions  by  way  of  theory,  and  that  what  they  do  say  about 

1  Welt  ala  Wille,  ii.  316. 


336  Schopenhauer's  system. 

them  is  of  no  importance  whatsoever,  because  their  actions 
are  all  governed  by  the  one  selfish  eflbrt  after  mere  existense 
and  mere  personal  happiness.  In  all  this  the  influence  of  the 
eighteenth  century,  with  its  theories  about  the  "  natural  man  " 
and  natural  rights  and  "  the  social  contract,"  is  most  apparent. 

It  is  needless  to  say  that  Schopenhauer  showed  little  love 
or  sympathy  in  looking  at  men /row  the  outside  in  the  way  in 
which  he  did.  The  love  and  the  sympathy  that  he  talked 
about  both  represented  an  imaginary  solution  of  an  imaginary 
difficulty.  They  were  both  put  forward  as  desperate  remedies 
for  a  desperate  disease — extreme  selfishness.  The  very  intel- 
lectualism  of  his  love  and  sympathy  disproves  their  value  as 
positive  ethical  principles.  They  both  rested  in  his  mind 
simply  on  the  intellectual  perception  or  the  intellectual  con- 
viction that  all  human  beings  were  really  and  fundamentally 
one  and  the  same  substance  (the  will  to  live),  although  they 
appeared  to  be  different.  Here,  again,  he  is  at  the  eighteenth 
century  point  of  view,  which  makes  individual  men  seem  to 
be  as  different  and  as  separate  from  one  another  as  they 
possibly  can  be.  He  violently  separated  men  from  each 
other  at  the  outset,  or  he  imagined  that  extreme  individualism 
was  the  fact  from  which  he  had  to  start,  and  he  violently 
and  desperately  brought  the  separate  individuals  together,  in 
order  that  some  sort  of  ethical  relations  might  seem  to  prevail 
among  men.  La  volonU  de  tons  was  really  a  very  trouble- 
some thing  to  Schopenhauer  in  his  extreme  desire  to  show 
that  the  world  was  only  une  scule  volonU.  He  took  up  the 
problem  of  ethics  with  the  idea  that  individuals  as  individuals 
had  simply  to  be  suppressed  and  negated.     That  was  all. 

This  reference  to  the  Zcit-Geist  of  the  eighteenth  century 
is  far  from  being  "  external "  or  forced  in  the  case  of 
Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  It  is  perfectly  apparent 
what  he  tried  to  do  in  ethics.  He  tried  to  reconcile 
what  has   been  called  the  "  abstract  individualism "   of  the 


SCHOrKNHAUER's   MOKAL    PHILOSOPHY.  337 

eighteeutli  century  with  the  rutionah'sin  or  the  intellectual  ism 
of  Socrates  or  Kant  (with  what  they  deemed  to  be  absolute 
knowledge  and  absolute  goodness  of  will),  and  also  to  some 
extent  with  the  facts  of  life.  He  failed  in  that  as  every 
one  else  has  done,  from  Rousseau  and  Bentham  downwards. 
All  thinkers  who  start  with  the  idea  that  men  are  funda- 
mentally selfish  and  different  from  one  another,  are  forced  in 
the  end  to  bring  them  together  in  a  very  violent  way ;  only, 
in  fact,  by  some  "  third  thing,"  some  third  entity,  which 
is  over  and  above  both  the  individual  and  society,  such  as  an 
absolute  state,  or  a  providential  natural  order  (there  is  some- 
thing of  the  latter  idea  ii-  Adam  Smith,  for  example). 
Schopenhauer  was  the  more  sure  to  fail,  as  he  can  hardly 
be  claimed  to  have  seen  any  one  thing  clearly  in  ethics. 
Some  of  the  worst  things  in  eighteenth  century  thought, 
and  some  rough  equivalent  of  the  Christian  doctrine  of  the 
ladical  evil  in  hvuian  nature,  and  the  supreme  desire  to  get 
at  all  costs  a  philosophical  synthesis,  coloured  everything  he 
saw. 

He  tried,  in  the  first  place,  to  find  out  some  one  thing  in 
human  nature  that  was  universally  true  about  it.  This  is 
certainly  next  to  impossible,  unless  we  are  content  with  the 
broadest  possible  generalisation,  such  as  a  theolo,r;ian  or  a 
metaphysician  vvould  make.  No  doubt  Schopenhauer  had  the 
concrete  intuition  of  the  evil  that  is  in  the  wo^-ld  (whether 
such  an  intuition  was  with  him  an  affair  of  instinct  or  of 
training) ;  and  no  doubt  he  wanted  to  make  as  much  of  that 
intuition  as  he  could,  to  overturn  ordinary  ethics  with  it,  in 
fact.  But  his  apotheosis  of  selfishness  is  just  a  chapter  in 
the  history  of  the  introduction  of  the  idea  of  the  natural  man 
into  the  moral  and  the  political  sciences.  It  represents,  in 
fact,  the  last  chapter  of  that  history,  when  the  early  crude 
way  of  conceiving  the  natural  man,  borrowed  from  crude  Pro- 
testant theology  and    Stoicism    and    the    old  Academy   was 


338  Schopenhauer's  system. 

flickering  luridly  before  it  died  out.  It  was  to  l)e  expected 
that  the  idea  of  the  "  natural  man  "  should  come  before  meta- 
physic,  its  highest  tribunal,  after  iiaving  flourished  in,  and 
nearly  wrecked,  several  of  the  special  sciences,  such  as  political 
science  and  ethics  and  political  economy.  The  conception 
of  the  natural  man  was  largely  negative  at  the  end  of  the 
eighteenth  century  ;  the  "  natural  man  "  was  thought  of  simply 
as  the  unwilling  slave  of  established  law,  law  itself  being 
conceived  more  as  arbitrary  and  conventional  than  as  rational 
and  necessary.  But  it  is  impossible  to  assert  only  one  pas- 
sion or  feeling  about  human  nature.  Even  Eousseau  ^  says, 
"  Qui  ne  sent  que  I'araour  ne  sent  pas  ce  qu'il  y  a  de  plus 
doux  dans  la  vie.  Je  connais  iin  autre  sentiment,  moins  im- 
petueux  peut-etre  mais  plus  delicieux  niille  fois,  qui,"  etc. 

Whenever  men  came  to  understand  the  evolutionary  idea, 
the  natural  man  was  seen  no  longer  in  a  merely  negative  but 
also  in  a  positive  aspect,  as  the  creator,  in  fact,  of  all  that  he 
was,  for  a  fatal  moment  in  the  history  of  thought,  supposed 
to  be  anxious  to  overturn.  The  laws  of  the  state  and  the 
institutions  under  which  men  live  are  not  really  repressive  of 
his  liberty,  but  concrete  aids  to  the  realisation  of  his  true 
humanity,  aids  which  he  himself  has  built  up  and  maintained 
during  the  ages  of  past  history,  Schopenhauer's  raetaphysic 
of  ethics  represents  as  sharply  as  can  well  be  conceived  the 
transition  from  the  mechanical  philosophy  of  society  of  the 
eighteenth  century  to  the  organic  social  philosophy  of  the 
nineteenth.  He  had  only  the  slender  hold  on  political  philo- 
sophy and  political  science  that  the  fact  of  its  being  a  link 
in  that  transition  implies.  He  showed  that  fatal  inability 
to  grasp  the  conception  of  sovereignty,  whether  in  its  ethical 
or  its  political  aspects,  which  is  common  to  the  exponents 
of  the  philosophy  of  naturalism  from  Eousseau  to  Herbert 
Spencer.      If  he  had  understood  the  fact  of  sovereignty  he 

'  Confessions,  p.  99  (Biblioth^iiue  Charpentier  :  1886). 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.         339 

would  have  understood  Socrates  and  Kant  better,  and  the 
part  that  the  reason  or  the  rational  will  or  the  rational  con- 
sciousness plays  in  co-ordinating  the  various  impulses  of  life, 
and  in  making  life  systematic  and  orderly.  Evolution  or 
no  evolution,  the  first  fact  about  man  is  the  idea  of  being 
controlled  by  something  other  than  his  mere  wayward  or 
capricious  will,  just  as  the  first  idea  about  a  state  is  the  idea 
and  the  fact  of  sovereignty,  apart  altogether  from  the  question 
how  the  idea  or  the  fact  of  that  sovereignty  arose,  or  who  the 
individuals  were  who  were  the  first  to  act  upon  it.  Will 
simply  cannot  overturn  society  or  the  state,  for  these  things 
rest  not  so  much  upon  the  will  which  is  achieving,  but  upon 
the  will  which  has  already  achieved,  upon  established  will. 
Will  is  established  in  the  case  of  the  individual  in  the  system 
of  tendencies  towards  self  -  government  which  are  in  him 
because  he  is  already  a  member  of  a  human  and  not  of  a 
bestial  society.  Will  is  established  in  society  in  the  various 
organised  institutions  which  express  society's  co-ordinating 
power  over  itself,  and  its  controlling  power  over  refractory 
individuals. 

There  are  many  things  which  go  to  show  that  a  confused 
naturalism,  bred  of  a  radically  incoherent  Protestantism  and  an 
incipient  natural  science  and  the  revolutionary  spirit,  exists  in 
Schopenhauer.  There  are  numerous  expressions  in  his  writings 
about  the  duty  of  the  state,  the  "sovereignty  of  the  people," 
the  "  freedom  of  the  press,"  the  "  balance  of  European  power," 
the  "  foundation  of  the  state,"  which  show  him  to  have  been 
perfectly  familiar  with  and  a  good  deal  influenced  by  the  false 
political  philosophy  which  nearly  wrecked  Europe  at  the  end 
of  last  century.  In  what  he  says  about  the  state,  the  merely 
negative  or  merely  restrictive  functions  of  government  are 
most  apparent.  "  The  end  of  the  state,"  he  says,  "  is  that 
no  one  should  suffer  evil,"  it  being  natural,  as  it  were,  in  his 
eyes,  that  man  (who  is  "  at  bottom  only  a  wild  and  terrible 


340  Schopenhauer's  system. 

beast ")  should,  in  a  state  of  anarchy  or  imaginary  freedom  from 
restraint,  try  to  trample  down  his  fellows  exactly  as  the  beasts 
are  supposed  to  have  done  on  the  theory  of  natural  selection. 
Schopenhauer  himself  does  not  "  seriously  suppose  "  that  any 
one  could  deny  the  "  sovereignty  of  the  people,"  in  the  sense 
that  "  no  one  has  the  right  to  dominate  a  people  against  its 
will."  The  reason,  too,  that  he  assigns  for  his  belief  that 
monarchy  is  the  form  of  government  best  suited  to  human 
nature  as  it  is,  shows  no  signs  of  a  departure  from  this 
naturalism  in  political  theory  of  which  we  are  speaking.  He 
says  that  monarchy  is  the  most  natural  form  of  government ; 
but  by  natural  he  does  not  mean  what  Aristotle  meant  when 
he  said  that  man  was  by  nature  a  political  being.  His 
reason  is  a  purely  naturalistic  or  physiological  one.  "  Even  an 
animal  organism  is  constructed  (he  does  not  say  organised) 
monarchically ;  the  brain  alone  is  the  guide,  the  ruler,  the 
Hegemonikon.  The  monarchical  form  of  government  is  the 
natural  one  for  men,  just  as  it  is  so  too  for  bees  and  ants,  and 
wandering  cranes  and  elephants,  and  ravenous  wolves  and 
other  animals,  all  of  which  place  a  single  leader  at  the  head 
of  their  undertakings."  ^  Schopenhauer  quotes  Homer  in  this 
regard,  who  says — 

ovK  dyaSbv  iroXvKoipavCr]'  els  Koipavos  ccttw, 
CIS  /Sao-iXeus.^ 

Of  course  physiological  analogy  in  the  case  of  government  is 
found  in  many  writers  on  political  science,  who  have  sounder 
ideas  on  the  functions  of  government  than  has  Schopenhauer, 
such  as  Bodin  ^  and  others ;  but  one  feels  justified  in  main- 
taining that  Schopenhauer  took  in  general  merely  that  ordin- 
ary naturalistic  view  of  human  society  in  which  sovereignty 

^  Schop.,  Werke,  vi.  271  ;  Zur  Rechtslehre  u.  Politik,  passim. 
«  Iliacl,  ii.  204. 

3  De  la  Rdpublique  (1586),  in  the  earlier  chapters,  where  Bodin  attacks  the 
communism  of  More  and  Plato  and  the  Anabaptists. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  341 

is  explained  only  on  loose  and  fallacious  utilitarian  grounds. 
Although  he  despised  history  too,  it  is  easy  to  see  that  he 
was  profoundly  influenced  by  the  introduction  (represented 
by  Montesquieu)  of  historical  considerations  into  the  study 
of  politics.  And  the  introduction  of  the  historical  spirit 
into  the  political  sciences  tended  at  first  rather  to  give  cred- 
ence to  the  idea  that  society  had  arisen  out  of  non-social 
elements.  The  whole  organisation  of  the  state,  to  Schopen- 
hauer, serves  only  to  keep  the  passions  of  man  under  control 
and  no  more ;  it  is  itself  controlled  only  by  means  of  the 
safety-valve  of  the  "  freedom  of  the  press,"  and  the  general 
equilibrium  of  forces,  or  the  general "  balance  of  power."  The 
equilibrium  of  the  state  might  be  disturbed  at  any  moment, 
and  the  wild  beasts  which  it  keeps  within  bounds  would  again 
roam  about  with  their  fangs  and  their  claws  exposed. 

Nor  was  Schopenhauer,  as  we  have  suggested,  more  success- 
ful in  thinking  out  the  sovereignty  of  the  individual's  control 
over  himself.  There  is  for  him  no  law  of  duty  from  which 
man  cannot  escape,  no  sense  of  an  obligation  to  make  one's 
life  truly  harmonious.  In  fact,  even  the  mere  organic  control 
of  the  impulses  is  not  a  thing  that  is  perfectly  understood  by 
Schopenhauer,  the  mere  power  of  the  brain  in  co-ordinating 
and  regulating  the  bodily  functions.  Man  to  Schopenhauer 
is  simply  in  a  state  of  inward  confusion  and  conflict ;  he  has 
some  tendencies,  of  course,  to  think,  but  many  more  to  act, 
which  he  cannot  control.  Man  is  torn  all  his  life  long  by 
a  hopeless  struggle  between  his  brain  and  his  other  bodily 
organs,  and  there  can  be  no  abatement  of  this  struggle  save 
by  death,  or  by  the  fanciful  (?)  emancipation  of  the  mind  from 
the  influence  of  the  body,  or  by  the  forced  unselfishness,  which, 
in  his  philosophy  of  ethics  and  religion,  he  suggests  under  the 
name  of  sympathy  or  disinterestedness.  Schopenhauer  saw 
everything  in  nature  and  in  man  "  red  in  tooth  and  claw " ; 
and  the  whole  force  of  the  ideas  of  his  time  combined  with 


342  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  force  of  his  own  predilection  for  natural  science  and  hi.s 
own  uncontrollable  natnrel  to  make  liini  utterly  unable  to 
think  out  (either  in  the  case  of  the  state  or  in  that  of  the 
individual)  a  consistent  philosophy  of  order. 

So  far  as  Schopenhauer's  ethical  difficulties  arise  from  nu 
attempt  to  bring  the  abstract  individual  or  the  natural  self  or 
the  wayward  self  into  an  ethical  kingdom,  they  may  be  said 
to  be  largely  imaginary  and  unreal.  There  is  no  such  abstract 
or  utterly  isolated  or  merely  selfish  self,  utterly  opposed  to  law 
and  order  and  sympathetic  co-ordination  with  the  life  of  society 
at  large.  The  Hegelian  ethic,  indeed,  regards  even  duty  as  a 
transitional  aspect  of  morality,  just  because  the  individual  is 
really  a  member  of  a  social  whole,  relations  to  which  define 
the  sphere  of  his  action.  Schopenhauer,  however,  would  not 
have  allowed  the  problem  of  ethics  proper  to  disappear  in  what 
Hegel  calls  "  Sittlichkeit,"  ordinary  or  conventional  morality. 
He  would  not  have  allowed  the  individual  to  disappear  alto- 
gether in  society,  and  there  is  some  ethical  justification  for  his 
position.  No  amount  of  mere  social  progress  can  make  up  for 
or  completely  obliterate  the  radical  contradiction  which  exists 
in  the  case  of  every  individual  between  his  rational  self  and  his 
wayward  or  imperfect  self.  It  is,  after  all,  what  we  might  call 
the  dialectic  of  the  ethical  consciousness  that  is  the  first  and 
the  last  thing  in  Schopenhauer's  ethics.  In  the  ethical  agent 
there  is  ever  a  struggle  between  what  he  knows  and  what 
he  does,  between  the  intellect  and  the  will.  It  is  this  struggle 
which  is  for  Schopenhauer  the  fundamental  fact  in  ethics.  As 
a  matter  of  fact,  there  does  exist  in  the  case  of  the  individual, 
as  an  individual,  a  Ir.sting  conflict  between  the  will  and  the 
intellect.  In  this  sense  the  problem  of  ethics  is  certainly  how 
to  make  the  will  good.  However  widely  and  deeply  a  man 
may  contemplate  the  world  as  a  whole,  and  however  com- 
pletely he  may  try  to  devote  his  life  to  the  service  of  his 


Schopenhauer's  moral  thilosophy.  34;? 

fellow-men,  there  is  .something  in  himself  that  he  never  alto- 
gether gets  away  from,  the  radical  imperfection  of  his  own 
nature.  Whether  wo  believe  that  the  supreme  category  of 
ethics  is  "  duty  "  or  the  "  moral  end,"  there  is  always  a  conflict 
in  the  individual  between  the  wayward  self  and  the  rational 
self,  between  the  egoistic  self  and  the  altruistic  self.  There 
is,  indeed,  a  fundamental  contradiction  in  all  morality,  and  in 
the  very  nature  of  the  moral  life,  which  it  is  the  supreme 
business  of  ethics  to  explain  or  at  least  to  consider.  In  the 
moral  life  we  never  completely  come  out  of  the  "  wilder- 
ness "  into  the  "  promised  land."  Morality  somehow  always 
seems  to  enjoin  upon  a  man  that  he  should  be  different  from 
and  better  than  what  he  actually  is.  This  permanent  contra- 
diction is  of  the  very  essence  of  morality,  and  we  can,  to  a  large 
extent,  sympathise  with  Schopenhauer's  wholesale  condemnation 
of  all  ethical  philosophy  that  does  not  take  adequate  account 
of  the  contradiction. 

Viewed  in  a  certain  regard,  the  problem  of  ethics  is  just  the 
dialectic  or  the  contradiction  which  seems  to  exist  in  the  will 
of  man.  Man  is  always  trying  to  be  what  he  is  not.  A  com- 
plete ethical  philosopliy  must  reckon  with  this  fact.  Morality, 
as  Schopenhauer  said,  is  an  affair  nf  the  will  and  not  merely 
of  the  intellect.  If  it  were  an  affair  of  the  intellect,  we  could 
possibly  rise  to  the  intellectual  knowledge  of  which  Spinoza 
and  other  transcendental  moralists  speak — the  knowledge  of 
the  world  as  a  whole  and  of  men  as  parts  in  that  whole. 
But  Schopenhauer  refuses  to  allow  that  morality  is  only  an 
affair  of  the  intellect.  That  is  why  he  passes  over  Socrates 
almost  in  a  sentence.  He  had  a  firm  conviction  that  all  nierely 
rationalistic  ethics  was  wrong  in  speaking  as  if  morality  were 
an  affair  of  the  intellect  rather  than  of  the  will.  Why  can- 
not man  attain  to  his  moral  ideal  ?  The  answer  is,  because 
the  nature  of  man  is  will,  and  will  means  ever  trying  to  be 
and  never  being.     When  we  think  of  this  contradiction  that 


344  Schopenhauer's  system. 

characterises  all  life,  we  can  see  how  a  considerable  amount 
of  illusionism  about  things  should  naturally  arise  in  Schopen- 
hauer's mind,  even  from  the  standpoint  of  ethics  alone.  He 
could  not  allow  himself  to  say  that  the  end  of  the  moral  life 
was  the  highest  possible  attainment,  simply  because  attainment 
would  mean  to  him  the  negation  of  the  will.  The  difficulty  of 
ethics  lay,  for  Schopenhauer,  in  the  fact  that  the  individual 
always  has  p  tendency  to  will  for  himself,  and  yet  that  he 
must  somehow  be  made  to  will  for  the  sake  of  others.  It 
does  not  matter  so  much  what  Schopenhauer  considered  to 
be  the  material  nature  of  the  contradiction  in  the  will  of 
man.  The  fact  that  he  saw  the  formal  contradiction  there 
— the  simple  contradiction  between  the  is  and  the  ouf/ht — is 
sufficient  to  make  his  theory  of  ethics  of  considerable  im- 
portance. It  is  easy  enough  to  get  over  the  dialectic  or 
the  contradiction  that  exists  in  the  ethical  consciousness  if 
morality  is  an  affair  of  the  intellect.  Ideally  speaking,  we 
are  already  perfect  if  we  even  wish  to  overcome  the  contra- 
diction that  is  in  our  nature  or  to  will  the  good  of  others. 
But,  really,  the  conflict  in  our  nature  is  never  healed,  because 
we  are  not  actually  what  we  wish  to  be  ideally,  because,  in 
short,  we  are  will — in  the  language  of  Schopenhauer. 

Knowledge  of  human  nature,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  is 
acquired  by  observing,  not  the  intellect,  but  the  will.  It  is  a 
man's  actions  which  show  what  he  really  is ;  his  ideas  show 
only  how  much  or  how  little  he  understands  of  the  world 
in  which  he  lives.  Schopenhauer  makes  us  feel  that  the 
naturalistic  or  the  observational  moralists  know  far  more 
about  human  nature  than  the  speculative  or  the  rationalistic 
moralists.  This  itself  is  worthy  of  notice.  There  is  much 
more  (to  put  tlie  matter  in  this  way)  to  be  learned  about 
liuman  nature  from  the  English  and  the  French  moralists 
than  from  the  German  philosophers.  Eousseau  certainly 
knew  far  more  about  the  human  heart  than  Kant  did,  and 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  345 

so  too  did  the  English  novelists  and  moralists  of  the  eigh- 
teenth century.  Schopenhauer  read  thesa  English  eighteenth- 
century  prose  writers,  and  he  read  French  moralists  almost 
more  than  any  other  class  of  ethical  writers.^  German 
moral  philosophers — one  cannot  say  moralists — almost  always 
place  the  reason  of  man  before  his  conduct ;  and  yet  we 
know  that  the  ends  o*  conduct  are  fixed  for  the  individual 
independently  altogether  of  his  own  natural  inclinations.  A 
man  can  reason  about  his  nature  only  after  he  knows  it ; 
and  he  knows  it  only  from  experience ;  and  the  most  valu- 
able conceptions  a  man  can  have  are  the  conceptions  which 
come  after,  rather  than  precede,  experience.  It  takes  a  man 
a  certain  amount  of  time  and  experience  to  acquire  a  reason- 
able knowledge  of  himself.  This  is  a  most  important  fact 
to  remember  in  reading  Schopenhauer.  We  know  how  little 
he  makes  throughout  his  philosophy  of  the  concept  or  ra- 
tional ide.  .  The  concept  seems  only  to  enable  us  to  under- 
stand life,  hardly  to  guide  it.  In  short,  we  have  to  guide 
our  lives  not  by  our  own  mere  knowledge  but  by  the  facts 
which  constitute  the  nature  of  things.  Life  is,  according  to 
Schopenhauer,  a  process  of  trying  to  conform  our  ideas  to 
the  necessity  that  is  in  things.  If  we  ask,  as  the  Greeks 
did,  "  Can,  then,  virtue  be  taught  at  all  ? "  Schopenhauer's 
answer  is  undoubtedly  nearer  that  of  Plato  than  that  of 
Aristotle.  Plato  thought  there  was  a  kind  of  divine  essence 
{Otiov  Ti)  about  virtue  which,  properly  speaking,  could  not 
be  taught ;  Schopenhauer  held  that  virtue  never  came  from 
abstract  knowledge  of  the  reason,  but  rather  from  a  kind  of 
mysterious  intuitive  knowledge — an  intuitive  knowledge  which 
makes  one  feel  that  all  things  and  all  persons  are  one  and 
the  same  will,  and  that  goodness  comes  not  from  affirming 
the  will  but  from  denying  it. 

'  It  is  said  that  the  majority  of  the  books  iu  his  personal  Hbrary  were  in  the 
French  language. 


346  SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 

Wherever  goodness  comes  from,  there  is  one  thing  that 
Schopenhauer  is  very  emphatic  about — that  it  does  not  come 
from  conceptual  or  rational  or  abstract  knowledge,  but  only 
from  intuitive  knowledge.  Our  general  experience  seems  some- 
how to  make  us  assent  to  this ;  real  virtue  or  goodness  is  a 
condition  of  the  will  which  must  either  be  born  in  persons 
or  be  acquired  by  them  by  a  sort  of  new  birth.  Virtue  can 
never  be  reasoned  into  a  man  on  utilitarian  or  rationalistic 
principles.  Nor  can  virtue  or  goodness  be  acquired  by  a 
mere  effort  of  personal  volition.  The  will  must  in  a  manner 
be  baptised  with  some  spirit  or  feeling  which  will  make  it 
seek  "  not  its  own  "  things  but  the  things  of  others,  not  the 
will  of  man  but  the  will  of  the  universe,  the  will  of  beauty 
and  of  goodness.  There  is,  then,  a  good  deal  of  meaning  in 
Schopenhauer's  contention  that  the  problem  of  ethics  lies  in 
the  will,  how  to  make  the  will  good,  how  to  "  universalise  " 
the  individual  will  in  its  motives  and  in  its  essence  so  as 
to  make  it  will  the  universal  good.  There  is,  for  Schopen- 
hauer, a  mystical  element  in  all  goodness.  One  has  the 
feeling  of  what  goodness  is,  but  one  carnot  be  completely 
good.  No  doubt,  we  are  to  some  extent  going  beyond  the 
sphere  of  mere  morality  when  we  seek  goodness  or  perfec- 
tion ;  in  the  sphere  of  duty  we  are  only  told  to  do  right 
or  not  to  do  wrong.  But  still  it  lies  in  the  very  idea  of 
morality,  Schopenhauer  would  say,  that  the  will  should  come 
to  be  in  harmony  with  the  knowledge  we  have  of  the  moral 
law  or  with  the  intuitive  knowledge  that  we  have  of  good- 
ness. It  would  be  rash  to  say  that  this  permanent  opposi- 
tion between  what  the  moral  law  demands  of  us  and  our 
ability  or  inability  to  fulfil  the  demands  of  that  law,  is  the 
precise  form  which  the  fact  of  the  inner  contradiction  that 
exists  in  the  will  takes  in  Schopenhauer ;  although  one  might 
risk  saying  so,  with  the  proviso  that  Schopenhauer  naturally  has 
his  own  ideas  on  the  nature  of  moral  law  or  moral  perfection. 


I' 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  347 

Schopenhauer  recognises  in  his  ethics  all  the  contradic- 
tions that  are  ordinarily  said  to  apply  to  the  will.  His 
use  of  the  word  will  is  really  almost  equal  to  the  ex- 
pression human  nature ;  to  him  the  will  or  human  nature 
is  in  a  state  of  contradiction  which  ethics  is  largely  unable 
to  remove.  While  we  cannot  accept  his  idea  of  a  total 
surrender  of  the  will  as  a  solution  of  the  ethical  problem, 
we  ought  to  be  willing  to  concede  that  the  contradiction 
which  he  finds  to  exist  between  egoism  and  altruism  (al- 
though only  a  part  of  ethics,  and  by  no  means  the  whole 
of  it)  is  not  after  all  an  utterly  irrelevant  or  imperfect  way 
of  contemplating  the  broad  element  of  contradiction  that 
characterises  the  whole  life  of  man.  If  the  world  is  so 
full  of  illusion  and  contradiction  as  Schopenhauer  makes  it 
out  to  be,  and  as  it  sometimes  seems  to  even  the  best  of 
men  to  be,  it  is  certainly  wrong  to  think  of  perpetuating 
the  world's  existence  in  the  lives  of  others.  In  short,  the 
question  of  egoism  and  altruism  is  bound  up  in  a  most  vital 
way  with  the  universally-confessed  contradiction  between  the 
"  is  "  and  the  "  ought "  in  the  will.  Morality  somehow  bids 
us  go  beyond  itself  in  seeking  the  completion  of  the  moral 
ideal.  If  the  will  became  good,  of  course  morality  would 
cease,  but  Schopenhauer  practically  teaches  that  morality 
cannot  be  thus  transcended  or  left  behind,  for  the  reason 
that  morality  is  an  affair  of  the  will.  So  long  as  the  will 
remains  in  conflict  with  itself,  the  world  stands  in  need, 
not  of  a  mere  Platonic  or  Hegelian  idealism,  but  of  actual 
regeneration.  The  real  outcome  of  Schopenhauer's  ethics  is 
illusionism.  Just  because  morality  is  an  affair  of  the  will, 
perfect  morality  is  something  that  never  can  be  attained  to 
by  human  nature,  because  human  nature  can  never  get  rid 
of  the  merely  individual  or  selfish  will. 

IV.  There  arc  several  additional  reasons  in  Schopenhauer 


348  Schopenhauer's  system. 

for  regarding  conduct  or  morality  as  something  illusory. 
Spinoza  suggested  that  men  never  know  the  infinitude  of 
causes  which  produce  their  actions,  and  this  idea  is  appre- 
hended in  its  full  scope  by  Schopenhauer.  He  observes  that 
the  ethical  and  religious  dogmas  which  men  sometimes  bring 
forward  in  support  of  their  conduct  are  very  often  nothing 
but  imaginary  theories,  which  they  invent  because  they  must 
have  some  reason  or  other  to  satisfy  their  intellect  about  their 
conduct.  But  conduct,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  cannot  be 
properly  explained  in  this  way ;  conceptions  and  notions  are 
inadequate  to  reality  in  general,  and  they  are  especially  in- 
adequate to  conduct.  Conduct  must  be  explaineil  as  eman- 
ating from  the  inward  necessity  of  the  will  or  the  impulses, 
or  the  needs  of  man's  nature.  A  man  never  knows  the  whole 
truth  about  his  conduct  through  his  own  mere  reason,  because 
reason  only  explains  to  him,  and  that  but  partially,  the  sur- 
face, as  it  were,  of  his  conduct — those  actions  which  with 
his  eyes  he  has  seen  to  emanate  from  himself ;  but  it  never 
tells  him  about  the  depths  of  his  conduct,  the  tendencies  to 
action  and  the  pent-up  energy  which  have  been  accumulated  in 
the  depths  of  his  nature  and  which  often  explode  without  any 
consciousness  on  liis  part.  "  L'esprit  est  toujours  la  dupe  du 
comr."  It  seems  true,  too,  that  men  are  not  wholly  to  be 
trusted  about  the  reasons  they  give  for  their  conduct.  To  be 
a  good  judge  of  his  own  conduct  a  man  would  require  to  be  a 
lirst-rate  physiologist  and  psychologist ;  he  would  require,  too, 
to  have  a  perfect  knowledge  of  his  own  character.  The  latter 
qualification  is  gained  by  experience,  as  has  been  pointed  out, 
and  the  former  is  one  that  very  few  men  possess.  A  truly 
good  man,  for  example,  when  asked  about  the  reasons  or  the 
motives  for  his  conduct,  may  talk  of  some  transient  desire  that 
he  had  or  some  external  standard  to  which  his  adherence  is 
after  all  only  nominal  and  not  real.  His  good  conduct  really 
came  from  his  good  heart ;  he  did  certain  things  because  he 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  349 

was  a  good  man  or  because  his  will  was  good,  and  he  might 
not  be  able  to  give  a  perfect  explanation  of  how  his  will 
became  good.  A  bad  man,  when  asked  about  his  vicious 
conduct,  will  probably  point  to  some  irritating  circumstance  in 
external  things  or  in  the  persons  with  whom  he  had  to  deal, 
whereas  the  truth  is  that  a  bad  man,  even  if  suddenly  trans- 
planted into  perfect  circumstances  and  among  good  people, 
would  still  exhibit  certain  tendencies  to  evil  which  he  could 
not,  at  least  for  a  certain  time,  even  resist,  much  less  over- 
come. As  long  as  either  goodness  or  badness  is  explained 
from  outside  the  personality  we  have  not  reached  the  root  of 
the  matter. 

"  In  the  case  of  good  deeds  the  doer  of  which  appeals  to 
dogmas,  we  must  always  distinguish  whether  these  dogmas 
really  are  the  motives  which  lead  to  the  good  deeds,  or 
whether,  as  was  said  above,  they  are  merely  the  ilhisive 
account  of  them  with  which  he  seeks  to  satisfi/  his  own  reason 
with  regard  to  a  good  deed  which  really  flows  from  quite  a 
different  source — a  deed  which  he  does  because  he  is  good 
though  he  does  not  understand  how  to  explain  it  rightly,  and 
yet  wishes  to  think  something  wiih  regard  to  it.  But  this 
distinction  is  very  hard  to  make,  because  it  lies  in  the  heart 
of  a  man.  Therefore  we  can  scarcely  ever  2Jass  a  correct  moral 
judgment  on  the  actions  of  others,  and  seldom  on  our  own."  ^ 

This  last  sentence  of  Schopenhauer's  is  one  of  the  best 
theoretical  expressions  of  the  illusionism  on  which  his  whole 
ethical  thought  reposes.  It  must  be  thought  of  in  connection 
with  the  dilemma  which  we  found  to  puzzle  him  in  his  Theory 
of  Knowledge.  He  said  there  that  the  higher  up  we  went  in 
the  scale  of  being — that  is,  as  we  passed  from  ordinary  things 
to  the  actions  of  man — the  less  explicable  do  we  find  things 
become.  Human  action  is  to  Schopenhauer  the  most  in- 
explicable of  all  things ;  it  flows  out  of  the  inward  necessity 
1  World  aH  Will,  Eng.  trans!.,  i.  476.    The  italics  are  mine. 


350  Schopenhauer's  system. 

(and  freedom)  of  the  will.  No  man  knows  what  he  really  is 
in  himself  until  he  has  felt  his  weakness  as  well  as  his 
strength.  The  rationalistic  idea  of  conduct  as  resting  upon 
perfect  self-knowledge  is  to  Schopenhauer  an  irritating  piece 
of  falsehood.  No  man  has  a  perfect  knowledge  of  himself,  at 
least  at  the  outset  of  his  life ;  and  so  it  is  wrong  on  general 
principles  to  explain  conduct  out  of  knowledge.  And  perhaps 
it  is  only  the  vulgar  and  the  half-educated  who  seek  to  ex- 
plain their  actions.  "  Only  he  who  intuitively  knows  the 
nature  of  men  as  they  in  general  are,  and  thus  comprehends 
the  individuality  of  the  person  before  him,  will  understand 
how  to  manage  him  with  sureness  and  rightness.  Another 
may  know  by  heart  all  the  three  hundred  maxims  of  Gracian, 
but  tliis  will  not  save  him  from  stupid  mistakes  and  miscon- 
ceptions, if  he  is  without  that  intuitive  knowledge." '  Scho- 
penhauer very  rarely  explains  actions,  or  at  least  explains 
them  by  reference  only  to  the  man  himself,  and  he  explains 
man  only  as  an  assertion  of  the  will  to  live.  Once  again, 
what  people  say  they  do — and  this  hits  the  rational  moral 
philosophers  who  theorise  upon  conduct  from  the  standpoint 
of  the  idea — is  of  no  importance ;  the  only  thing  that  is  of 
importance  is  what  men  do  ;  and  when  we  look  at  the  actions 
of  men,  we  find  that  they  are  all  of  them  assertions  of  the  one 
will  to  live.  Conduct  is  to  Schopenhauer  wholly  an  affair  of 
the  will,  and  men  will  never  in  his  eyes  be  different  or  perfect 
until  their  will  is  different  or  perfect. 

To  put  the  matter  definitely,  it  is  only  a  knowledge  of  his 
"  empirical "  (or  acquired)  character  that  Schopenhauer  is 
willing  to  concede  to  man.  Man,  that  is,  knows  himself  in 
so  far  as  he  has  observed  that  it  has  been  his  tendency  to  act 
in  certain  ways  and  to  seek  the  end  of  life  by  using  certain 
means.  Our  "  noumenal "  or  transcendental  character  (the 
roots  of  our  nature,  in   plain  prose)   Schopenhauer    teaches 

»  Welt  als  Wille,  ii.  81. 


I  ' 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  351 

that  we  never  do  know  but  only  vaguely  or  intuitively  ap- 
prehend. Conduct,  he  teaches,  arises  partly  out  ^f  some 
conscious  tendencies  of  our  own,  some  tendencies  that  we 
know,  that  we  develop  as  we  go  through  life,  and  partly, 
or  rather  very  largely,  out  of  a  great  many  unconscious 
tendencies.  Our  conscious  tendencies,  our  tendencies  to  seek 
tlie  end  of  life  in  a  certain  way  or  to  adopt  certain  means 
towards  the  end  of  life,  we  can  partly  modify ;  but  our 
unconscious  tendencies  we  are  not  the  authors  of,  and  can 
modify  only  to  a  very  limited  extent  if  to  any.  The  end  of 
Hfe  is  fixed  for  us  independently  of  our  volition,  and  we  have 
within  our  power  only  the  choice  of  certain  means  towards  the 
attainment  of  that  end.  Most  of  our  actions  we  do  not  fully 
comprehend  or  even  consciously  will.  We  have,  as  Schopen- 
liauer  would  put  it,  the  illusion  that  we  are  free  and  the 
illusion  that  we  understand  ourselves.  Our  question  just  now 
can  hardly  be  whether  these  notions  are  complete  illusions, 
but  only  whether  they  are  not  at  least  partly  illusory,  and 
that  from  the  standpoint  of  morality  alone.  Morality  tells  us, 
as  we  saw,  to  be  something — to  be  perfect,  say,  or  altruistic 
— which  we  know  quite  well  we  never  can  become.  If  we 
examine  Schopenhauer's  account  of  some  of  the  leading  con- 
ceptions of  ethics,  this  illusory  aspect  of  morality  will  become 
more  apparent. 

"  The  rebukes  of  conscience,"  says  Schopenhauer,  "  of  course 
refer  immediately  and  sensibly  to  our  acts,  to  what  we  have 
done,  but  in  reality  and  fundamentally  they  refer  to  what  we 
are,  as  that  to  which  alone  our  acts  bear  complete  testimony, 
inasmuch  as  our  acts  are  related  to  our  character  just  as 
symptoms  to  a  disease.     Only  in  virtue  therefore  of  our  real 

being,  of  what  we  are,  can  we  be  blamed  or  praised 

And  so  the  object  of  our  content  or  our  discontent  with  our- 
selves is  just  our  real  being,  what  we  are,  and  unalterably  are 
and  remain.     It  is  the  same  with  even  our  intellectual  and 


352  Schopenhauer's  system. 

physiognomical  characteristics.  Conscience  is  the  ever  groioiny 
and  the  ever  more  complete  knoiolcdge  of  ourselves,  the  protocol  of 
our  deeds  that  is  always  filling  itself  up."  ^  This  last  sentence 
is  very  important.  Conscience  is  ordinarily  described  as  the 
feeling  we  have  of  being  obligated  to  duty  in  general ;  but  the 
consciousness  of  duty  has  always  for  its  background  the  con- 
sciousness of  what  we  really  are  and  of  how  far  short  we 
inwardly  are  of  moral  perfection.  Our  conscience  reveals  to 
us  our  inability  as  well  as  our  ability  to  fulfil  the  moral  law. 
We  are  not  responsible  for  our  actions,  Schopenhauei  teaches 
us,  because  our  actions  flow  from  our  inward  being ;  we  are 
responsible  only  for  what  we  are,  for  our  inward  being  itself. 
"  But  we  did  not  make  ourselves  ! "  we  demur.  "  No,"  replies 
Schopenhauer,  "  but  you  freely  choose  to  be  what  you  are ; 
or  at  least  you  have  often  willed  purely  for  yourself  and  your 
own  imagined  comfort  and  happiness."  ^  Schopenhauer  holds 
that  the  idea  of  freedom  was  first  invented  to  account  for  the 
fact  of  wickedness  or  sin  on  the  assumption  of  theism — that 
is,  he  holds  that  the  whole  philosophy  of  freedom  has  come 
from  theology,  and  was  invented  by  theologians  only  to  re- 
concile the  human  mind  to  the  thought  of  its  responsibility 
for  its  conduct.  If  men  are  free,  they  taught,  they  are  partly 
responsible  for  being  what  they  are.  It  is  far  from  easy  to 
deny  this  theological  parentage  of  the  idea  of  freedom.  It 
is  at  least  true  that  the  question  of  freedom  is  distinctively 
a  modern  question,  and  has  been  most  keenly  discussed  in 
relation  to  the  great  historical  creeds  of  the  Church  and  the 
great  theological  systems.  It  is  true,  too,  that  what  is  meta- 
physically called  the  "  extreme  of  subjectivity,"  the  feeling  of 
the  alienation  and  separateness  and  individuality  of  the  human 
finite  person,  is  most  truly  reached  when  there  is  some  sort 
of  consciousness  of  our  own  personality  in  relation  to  a  con- 

'  Grundlage  der  Moral ;  Werke,  iv.  2."i6  fassim. 

2  This  point  is  opened  up  further  in  the  next  chapter. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  353 

ceived  personal  God}  Perhaps,  then,  it  is  true  that  the  whole 
question  of  freedom  has  descended  upon  philosophy  from 
theology.  Most  monistic  systems,  whether  evolutionistic  or 
idealistic  or  materialistic,  identify  the  question  of  man's  free- 
dom with  the  question  of  the  extent  to  which  man  is  some- 
how part  of  the  essence  of  the  universe — partly  creator,  even 
if  confessedly  more  than  three-fourths  a  creature.  That  is, 
they  contrive  to  sublimate  the  question  of  freedom  into  that 
of  the  universe  itself,  very  much  as  Schopenhauer  himself  does 
in  pushing  the  question  of  freedom  back  to  mean  simply  the 
freedom  of  the  will  that  manifests  itself  in  all  things. 

The  idea  of  anything  finite  and  created  being  free,  is  to 
Schopenhauer  perfect  nonsense,  just  as  freedom  is  virtually 
nothing  to  most  monistic  systems  whether  they  confess  this  or 
not.  Professor  Sidgwick  thinks  that  the  question  of  freedom 
may  very  well  be  left  out  of  ordinary  ethics,  as  he  does  not 
think  that  it  affects  men's  judgments  as  to  the  standard  of  right 
conduct.  This  idea  is  in  Schopenhauer  to  some  extent  too ; 
he  practically  scoffs  at  the  ignorance  implied  in  the  ordinary 
discussions  about  freedom.  And  there  is  certainly  something 
illusory  about  the  ordinary  conceptions  of  freedom.  When 
the  ordinary  man  is  in  argument  pushed  back  one  or  two 
removes  from  what  he  regards  as  the  fact  about  freedom,  he 
is  absolutely  "  at  sea  "  in  the  matter.  The  learned  all  tend 
to  wind  up  the  discussion  by  saying  that  the  idea  is  meaning- 
less when  applied  to  anything  that  is  an  ultimate  &enrce  of 
activity.^  Just  as  it  is  impossible  to  explain  the  flew  of  the 
blood  throughout  the  body  on  the  principles  of  mechanical 
physics  alone,  or  by  anything  short  of  the  tendency  of  the 
hving  matter  of  which  the  heart  is  composed  to  expand  and 
contract  in  a  periodic  way ;  so  the  actions  of  man  are  really 
explained  by  nothing   short  of  the  tendency  that  is  innate 

1  Cf.  supra,  p.  160. 

^  See  "Psychology,"  by  Dr  J.  Ward  (Ency.  Brit.,  9th  ed.) 

Z 


354  Schopenhauer's  system. 

in  him  to  seek  after  that  which  furthers  his  life  and  to  avoid 
that  which  hinders  it.     Man  is  always  "  free"  to  seek  "  life  " 
and  "  happiness  "  unless  he  is  tied  or  in  chains.     The  char- 
acter, Schopenhauer  teaches,  is  inborn  and  unalterable;   and 
what  is   in  our  consciousness   is  largely  or   almost   entirely 
determined  by  what  is  beloiv  the  sphere  of  our  consciousness, 
by  the  original  tendencies  of  our  nature.     Consequently  it  is 
not  our  actions  which  we  repent  of,  but  rather  what  we  are 
in  our  inmost  nature.     And  moral  growth  or  perfection,  in  so 
far  as  it  rests  upon  instruction  and  effort,  is  simply  the  pos- 
sibility of  our  acting  upon  what  our  intellect  tells  us  about 
the  limits  of   our  character.     Ordinary   moral   improvement 
leads  to  no  radical  change  in  our  inward  character.     Char- 
acter depends  on  the  will,  and  it  is,  according  to  Schopen- 
hauer, the  nature  of  the  will  to  seek  what  is  finite  and  selfish 
at  the  expense  of  what  is  ideal  and  unselfish.     He  says  that 
the  prayer,  "Lead  us  not  into  temptation,"  properly  means, 
"  Do  not  let  me  see  the  kind  of  man  I  am."     Therefore,  so 
far  as  freedom  and  repentance  and  moral   improvement  go, 
Schopenhauer  seems  only  to  show  up  more  hopelessly  than 
ever  the  inward  contradiction  of  the  will,  and  the  meaning- 
lessness  or  the  illusion  of  the  ethical  idea  which  bids  us  attain 
to  something  that  we  never  can  attain  to.     There  is,  we  may 
console  ourselves,  a  certain  soothing  effect  produced  upon  the 
mind  by  the  knowledge  of  the  necessity  in  our  own  nature 
and  in  the  world.     Conduct,  if  we  could  fully  understand  it, 
would  appear  to  us  to  be  in  reality  perfectly  invariable  and 
inevitable   and   necessary  in   the   mode  of   its   action.     "He 
who  is  thoroughly  penetrated  with  the  idea  of  necessity  ^vill 
do  what  he  can  and  suffer  what  he  must." 

V.  It  may  be  said  by  way  of  comment  on  all  this  that 
without  doubt  the  assumptions  of  ethics,  or  at  least  many  of 
these  assumptions,  take  us  beyond  the  scope  of  the  merely 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.         355 

practical  or  the  semi-scientific  treatment  that  is  adequate  to 
most  ordinary  ethical  questions.  It  is  true  that  etliics  is  a 
science  just  like  any  other  science,  and  can  give  us  no  final 
solutions  of  the  problems  it  raises,  such  as  freedom  and 
responsibility,  or  the  inherent  dualism  that  exists  in  the  will 
of  man.  Still  in  ethics  we  are  carried  directly  into  the  sphere 
of  what  is  noumenal  and  transcendental.  Conduct  arises  from 
the  will,  and  the  will  means  the  body  and  its  members  and 
its  constitution,  and  these  carry  us  back  through  all  nature 
and  into  the  depths  of  all  nature.  This  indicates  the  point 
where  Schopenhauer  passes  out  of  positive  ethics  into  the 
metaphysic  of  ethics.  It  is  my  will  which  carries  me  back 
to  my  "  first  parents  "  or  to  nattirc.  With  my  intellect  I  can 
of  course  identify  myself  with  the  universe,  and  so  to  a  certaiii 
extent  sublimate  my  personality  in  it.  But  in  so  far  as  my 
conduct  emanates  from  my  will,  I  am  made  acquainted  with 
the  sources  of  the  evil  that  is  in  myself ;  I  come  to  know 
that  my  deeds  are  myself,  and  that  in  virtue  of  my  evil  self 
my  being  is  in  a  state  of  inward  contradiction. 

All  my  theorising  about  my  conduct  does  not  alter  the  fact 
that  I  have  to  a  large  extent  willed  simply  my  own  personal 
satisfaction,  and  that,  as  having  done  so,  I  am  out  of  harmony 
with  the  nature  of  the  universe.^  Our  intellect  lights  up  only 
that  of  which  we  are  immediately  conscious  in  our  conduct, 
and  hence  the  explanation  of  conduct  out  of  the  idea  or  the 
concept  will  carry  us  a  very  small  way  indeed.^  This  is  the 
real  teaching  of  Schopenhauer  upon  ethics,  and  the  breadth 
and  the  significance  of  it  are  what  we  have  to  think  of.  The 
real  roots  of  our  being,  he  holds,  go  back  into  the  unknown. 
There  is  all  the  difference  in  the  world  between  our  actual 
consciousness  of  our  actions  and  complete  self-consciousness. 
We  may  be  conscious  of  the  states  and  activities  that  are  in 
the  self,  but  we  are  not  conscious  of  the  self.     "  Our  con- 

'  Cf.  following  chapter.  *  Cf.  supray  p.  183. 


356  Schopenhauer's  system. 

sciousness  becomes  brighter  and  clearer  the  more  we  go 
outwards,  and  indeed  its  greatest  clearness  lies  in  the  .sphere 
of  perception "  (any  simpleton,  as  it  were,  knows  external 
things,  whereas  even  a  Socrates  hardly  knows  himself) ;  "  it 
becomes,  on  the  contrary,  darker  as  we  go  within,  and  be- 
comes, when  followed  up  to  its  very  home,  darkness  where  all 
knowledge  passes  away.  This  is  because  consciousness  pre- 
supposes individuality;  but  individuality  belongs  to  the  mere 
phenomenon,  which  of  course  is  conditioned  by  its  appropriate 
forms  (space  and  time).  Our  inmost  being,  on  the  contrary, 
has  its  roots  in  that  which  is  no  longer  phenomenon,  but 
thing  in  itself,  to  which  the  forms  of  the  phenomenon  are  not 
adequate,  to  which,  therefore,  the  chief  determining  conditions 
of  individuality  are  wanting,  and  with  these  the  distinctness  of 
consciousness  falls  off.  In  this  root  of  existence  the  plurality 
of  beings  ceases,  just  as  the  rays  of  a  sphere  lose  their  plurality 
at  its  centre ;  and  just  as  in  the  sphere  the  surface  is  produced 
by  the  radii  ending  and  breaking  ofl',  so  consciousness  is  pos- 
sible only  where  the  essence  of  things  runs  out  into  the 
phenomenal  sphere,  through  whose  forms  separate  individu- 
ality becomes  possible  upon  which  consciousness  depends. 
Consciousness  is  thus  limited  to  phenomena  only."  ^  "  It  is 
in  its  inmost  depths  dark,  and  is,  i"^  fact,  with  all  its  objective 
cognitive  powers,  directed  towards  what  lies  without.  There 
on  the  outside  before  its  gaze  is  to  be  found  the  greatest 
brightness  and  clearness.  But  in  an  inward  direction  it  i;^ 
dark,  just  like  a  well -blackened  telescope;  there  is  no  a 
priori  knowledge  which  lights  up  the  night  of  its  inward 
recesses,  its  rays  of  light  shining  only  towards  the  outside." 
"  The  '  I '  is  the  dark  point  in  our  consciousness,  just  as  on 
the  retina  the  point  where  the  optic  nerve  enters  is  dark, 
and  just  as  the  eye  sees  everything  but  cannot  see  itself." 
Now  if  we  cannot  be  conscious  of  the  inmost  depths  of  our 

1  Werke,  iii.  370.    Cf.  chap.  iii.  p.  160. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  357 

personality,  we  cannot  be  held  to  be  conscious  of  the  roots  of 
our  actions  or  of  the  roots  of  the  evil  or  finite  self.     AVhen  we 
tliink  '^f  the  will  which  is  ourselves,  and  of  its  roots,  we  find 
that  both  it  and  they  go  back  to  the  beginning  of  creation. 
Our  tendency  to  do  actions  which  fall  short  of  the  moral  law 
or  the  moral  ideal  is  inborn  and  rooted  in  the  very  depths  of 
our  nature.      It  is  thus  easy  to  see  that  there  is  an  inner  con- 
tradiction  in   ourselves   in   regard   to    tlie  etliical   life.      The 
Sollen  or  the  "  ought "  is  a  permanent  fact,  but  yet  it  is  per- 
manently meaningless  for  us  as  a  practical  possibility,  because 
the  roots  of  our  will,  of  our  wayward  will,  go  back  to  infinity. 
Of  course  the  Hegelian  simply  recognises  this  inward  contra- 
diction in  the  will  as  of  the  very  essence  of  morality.     It  is  of 
the  essence  of  the  "  ought,"  he  says,  that  it  is  eternally  some- 
thing which  is  to  he  and  never  is.     He  then  proceeds  to  pass 
beyond  duty  into  some  higher  idea  or  fact  about  man's  life.    But 
duty  cannot  be  passed  over  in  this  way.     It  is  not  a  mere 
idea  for  man  ;  it  is  a  fact,  because  it  refers  to  his  will,  which 
is  his  real  existence.      Inasmuch  as  man  is  will,  the  category 
of  duty  cannot  be  explained   away  or  "  sublimated,"  as  the 
phrase  is      Buty,  for  example,  may  be  set  forth  in  a  higher 
Ught  by  the  idea  of  moral  faith  in  the  fulfilment  of  duty 
somewhere — in  the  universe,  say,  or  in  God — other  than  in 
the   life   of   the    mere    individual.       But   this    by   no    means 
exonerates  the  individual  from  his  particular  duties  here  and 
now,  nor  does  it  make  the  individual  as  God  or  the  universe 
is.     It  was  oasy  for  Hegel  to  allow  the  idea  of  duty  to  pass 
over  into  something  higher  than  mere  duty,  social  morality, 
to  wit, — because  the  essence  of  man's  life  to  him  was  soul 
or  spirit.     It  is  easy,  in  short,  to  sublimate  man  into  God  or 
into  society,  if  the  individual  is  merely  soul  or  spirit.     But 
the  will  of  the  individual  —  in  which  all  man''s  true  being 
resides — cannot  be  explained  away  so  easily  as  spirit  or  soul 
or  the  idea. 


358  Schopenhauer's  system. 

One  often  wonders  where  Hegel  got  his  idea  of  man's 
nature  or  of  the  essence  of  man's  nature.  He  seems  indeed 
to  have  assumed  "  spirit  "  to  be  the  essence  of  man's  life, 
without  ever  thinking  where  he  got  the  idea  of  spirit.  It 
came,  roughly  speaking,  from  Descartes  and  his  Cogito.  But 
Descartes  would  never  have  been  able  to  separate  himself,  in 
his  thought,  from  the  world  and  from  God  too,  for  that  part 
of  it,  if  he  had  not  had  all  the  wealth  of  a  thousand  years 
of  Christian  history  and  experience  to  go  upon.  Nor  could 
Montaigne  have  asked  his  (piestion  "  Que  scais-je  ?  "  Nor 
could  Luther  have  thought  of  himself  as  an  individual  before 
God,  nor  Kant  of  his  three  great  "  Ideas  of  the  Eeason."  It 
was  possible — that  is,  for  Hegel  and  for  Descartes,  and  for 
Montaigne  and  Kant — to  think  of  spirit  as  the  essence  of 
man's  life,  because  the  idea  of  spirit  had  in  it  practically  the 
wealth  of  centuries  of  Christian  thought  and  experience.  It 
may  be  questioned,  however,  if  even  Christianity  ever  thinks 
of  the  spiritual  life  of  man  as  apart  from  a  bodily  life ;  in  its 
highest  nights  it  seems  to  talk  of  a  spiritual  body  taking  the 
place  of  a  natural  body,  but  still  it  always  thinks  of  a  body 
of  some  sort  as  essentially  an  accompaniment  of  the  soul. 
Schopenhauer  is  far  too  near  the  earth  we  live  on  to  allow 
the  dualism  between  soul  and  body  to  become  so  pronounced 
that  one  element  in  that  dualism  (soul,  say)  might  be  thought 
strong  enough  to  eliminate  the  other  altogether.  Man's  life 
is  a  manifestation  of  the  will  to  live,  and  this  implies  the 
existence  of  an  individual  organic  body,  for  the  will  always 
is,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  the  effort  to  possess  and  pene- 
trate a  given  amount  of  matter.  Duty  is  a  real  thing  and 
not  an  imaginary  thing,  because  it  applies  to  the  will  of  man 
as  that  actually  exists  in  a  definite  living  organism. 

Schopenhauer  could  not  explain  from  the  standpoint  of 
ethics  alone  the  radical  contradiction  that  exists  in  the  will  of 
man.     Because  he  could  not  do  this  he  seems  to  pronounce 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  359 

the  world  illusory  from  the  ethical  standpoint.  He  found  the 
ethical  consciousness  to  be  involved  in  a  permanent  contradic- 
tion between  egoism  and  altruism,  or  between  selfishness  and 
disinterested  benevolence.  It  cannot  be  said  that  the  indi- 
vidual's failings  are  remedied  by  society,  or  that  society  com- 
pletely solves  the  opposition  between  egoism  and  altruism. 
Even  the  intellectual  perception  of  the  identity  of  all  willing 
beings  is  not,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  strong  enough  to  overcome 
the  tendency  that  the  individual  still  has  to  seek  his  own 
happiness.  Consequently  Schopenhauer  could  not  solve  the 
dualism  that  exists  in  morality.  Nor  can  that  dualism  be 
solved  so  long  as  the  ro  .lical  contradiction  tha"^^  exists  in  the 
will  of  man  is  not  completely  removed.  Ethics,  in  short,  has 
to  deal  with  the  radical  conflict  between  what  may  be  called 
"  reason  "  and  what  may  be  called  "  will " ;  or  between  the 
universal  will  and  the  finite  or  particular  will.  The  desperate 
straits  to  which  Schopenhauer  was  put  in  his  attempt  to  solve 
this  conflict  show  clearly  that  the  mere  intellect  or  conscious- 
ness of  man  is  not  adequate  to  its  solution.  The  problem  of 
ethics  comes  to  be,  as  Schopenhauer  said,  the  question  of 
making  the  will  good.  By  placing  the  root  of  conduct  in 
the  will  Schopenhauer  has  expressed  the  fact  that  the  attain- 
ment of  the  ethical  ideal  is  a  permanent  difficulty  for  man 
and  not  a  transitional  one. 

VI.  As  to  egoism  and  altruism,  one  or  two  concluding 
remarks  may  be  made.  The  whole  attempt  to  solve  the 
ethical  problem,  with  a  regard  mainly  to  the  individual 
man,  may  seem  to  some  people  morbid  and  unreal.  The  very 
difficulties,  they  would  say,  that  we  have  found  in  seeking  for 
the  reality  of  moral  perfection  in  the  individual  show  us  that 
we  had  better  look  to  society  for  the  solution  of  the  ethical 
problem.  Both  the  Comtist  and  the  evolutionist  say  in 
substance    to    Schopenhauer,  "  Life    is    explicable   only   from 


360  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  social  standpoint  or  the  standpoint  of  humanity  at  large ; 
for  the  inclivid%ial  as  indivzdtial  there  is  no  comiJlete  solution  of 
the  problem  of  life."  Schopenhauer  himself  believed  that  the 
apparent  end  of  the  will  was  the  perpetuation  ol  the  race, 
and  that  lonsequently  the  world  is  illusory  from  the  ethical 
standpoint  so  long  as  a  man  regards  his  own  individual 
welfare  or  happiness  as  anything  of  ultimate  moment.  It 
is  certainly  true  that  if  the  individual  persists  in  regarding 
himself  as  a  mere  individual  there  is  no  solution  of  the 
world  for  him.  This  is  one  of  tlie  chief  lessons  of  life,  and 
Schopenhauer  teaches  it  as  emphatically  as  any  one  else. 
The  will  is  tlie  will  to  live,  and  to  live  again  in  others. 
The  will  receives  "  content "  in  our  living  in  others.  This 
is,  so  to  speak,  the  ethical  reason  for  altruism.  From  the 
standpoint  of  the  mere  individual,  or  the  "  abstract "  in- 
dividual of  the  eighteenth  century,  the  reasons,  whether 
rational  or  natural,  for  living  again  in  the  lives  of  others 
are  far  from  conclusive.  If  the  individual  is  really  complete 
in  himself,  and  if  society  is  made  up  only  of  individuals  in 
an  aggregate  or  totality,  the  argument  for  benevolence  and 
disinterestedness  can  never  be  made  logically  perfect.  But 
on  the  other  hand,  to  take  vip  the  case  for  Schopenhauer, 
there  is  no  completely  rational  ground  for  altruism  unless 
one  is  convinced  that  the  society  for  which  one  is  to  sacri- 
fice something  of  one's  own  is  to  be  morally  better  than  one 
finds  one's  own  natural  self  to  be.  And  so  the  question  of 
altruism  becomes  logically  bound  up  with  the  question  of  the 
possibility  of  one's  being  able  to  realise  in  one's  self  the  ideal 
that  is  ordained  by  duty. 

There  is  no  rational  sanction  for  producing  or  helping  to 
sustain  beings  who  will  be  intrinsically  no  better  than  I  am 
myself.  Evolution  can  only  say  that  the  lives  of  the  beings 
who  succeed  me,  and  whom  I  may  influence,  are  likely  to  be 
more  diversified  and  complex  than  my  own.     But  civilisation 


SCHOPENHAUER'S   MORAL   PHILOSOPHY.  361 

cannot  be  said  to  guarantee  that  human  l^eings  will  be  intrin- 
sically better  than  they  are  now  or  than  I  am  now.  It  would, 
indeed,  be  a  step  in  the  progress  of  civilisation  for  the  civilised 
world  to  come  to  admit  this.  The  possibility  of  its  doing  so 
is  the  only  social  outlook  that  Schopenhauer  entitles  us  to 
take.  He  cared  little  about  social  or  political  (^ousideratijns, 
because  he  did  not  see  thai,  humanity  was  or  could  be  better 
than  individual  men.  Morality  is  thus,  in  the  first  instance 
and  formally  regarded,  an  individual  thing,  however  true  it 
may  be  that  the  individual  can  attain  to  fulness  of  life  only 
by  living  to  some  consid(3rable  extent  in  others.  Thus,  from 
the  ethical  standpoint,  if  the  world  must  be  judged  illusory 
by  the  individual — as  Schopenhauer  holds  it  must — it  is 
essentially  ilhvory.  And  so  we  can  see  why  Schopenhauer 
liked  Buddhism.  Buddhism  seeks  salvudon  for  the  race  not 
in  any  half  measures  of  social  reformation  or  social  recon- 
struction, but  in  a  complete  conquest  of  the  secular  spirit  as 
such,  and  of  all  desire  for  mere  selfish  and  personal  existence. 
The  present  age  is  too  apt  to  exalt  the  social  question 
above  the  moral  question.  Nevertheless  the  conflict  between 
the  moral  ideal  and  the  moral  will  of  man  is  ultimately  the 
point  upon  which  social  as  well  as  individual  welfare  depends. 
If  moral  perfection  cannot  somehow  be  guaranteed  to  man  as 
an  individual,  there  does  not  seem  to  be  much  reason  why  the 
world  should  continue  to  exist  and  evolv^e.  Ethical  perfection, 
of  course,  is  net  primarily  the  question  of  ethics,  but  it  arises 
naturally  out  of  what  we  have  called  the  dialectic  of  duty,  or 
the  contradiction  that  exists  in  the  will  of  man.  If  there  is 
no  possibility  of  the  individual's  attaining  to  perfection  as  a 
moral  being  the  world  is  certainly  illusory.  A  person  who 
is  not  convinced  of  the  possibility  of  moral  perfection  in  the 
individual  has  no  completely  rational  sanction  for  altruism, 
Schopenhauer's  failure  to  solve  the  question  of  altruism  is 
in  this  regard  characteristic.     He  really  solved  it  only  by  a 


362  Schopenhauer's  system. 

salto  mortale.  His  main  reason  for  altruism  is  that  others 
are  just  as  bad  as  one  is  one's  self,  and  ought  consequently 
to  be  helped  to  bring  the  world  to  an  end  as  soon  as  possible. 
"  Boundless  sympathy  for  all  living  beings  is  the  best  and  the 
surest  guarantee  of  social  well-being.  This  truth  needs  to  be 
supported  by  no  casuistry.  He  who  is  filled  with  sympathy 
will  assuredly  injure  no  one,  hurt  no  one,  do  harm  to  no  one, 
but  rather  treat  every  one  with  care,  pardon  every  one,  help 
every  one  as  much  as  he  can,  and  all  his  actions  will  bear  the 
stamp  of  justice  and  benevolence.  Let  any  one  make  the 
attempt  to  say,  '  This  man  is  virtuous,  but  he  has  no  pity,*  or, 
'  He  is  an  unjust  and  wicked  man,  but  yet  he  is  full  of  pity,' 
and  tlie  contradiction  will  at  once  become  apparent.  Taste 
may  differ  somewhat ;  but  I  know  no  more  beautiful  prayer 
than  this  one  with  which  the  ancient  Indian  plays  conclude 
(just  as  in  early  times  English  plays  with  one  for  the  king). 
It  is  this,  '  May  all  living  beings  be  free  from  pain.' "  ^  Unless, 
however,  the  moral  question  is  solved  or  is  soluble,  to  devote 
attention  to  the  social  problem  betokens  a  want  of  intellectual 
seriousness.  Social  Utopias  founded  upon  science  and  enforced 
social  sentiments  are  impossible  to  the  sage  of  Frankfort.  If 
the  world  is  illusory  from  an-  individual  standpoint,  it  is  also 
illusory  from  a  social.  Schopenhauer's  social  and  political 
philosophy  was  partial ;  but  his  partiality  may  well  be  par- 
doned so  far  as  it  was  the  effect  of  his  insight  into  the  per- 
manent dualism  that  exists  in  the  will  of  man.  The  end 
of  this  century  may  witness  a  partial  return  to  the  moral 
consciouLtness  of  the  individual.^  For  some  time  past  the 
individual  has  lost  himself  in  the  contemplation  on  the  one 
hand  of  an  animal  past  and  the  struggle  for  life,  and  on  the 
other  of  an  imaginary  future  when  the  methods  of  science 

'  Grundlage  der  Moral,  Werke,  iv.  236. 

"  There  are  many  indications  at  present  of  a  revival  of  the  moral  point  of  view 
in  regard  to  the  social  question — e.g.,  "The  Ethical  Solution  of  our  Social  Pro- 
blem."    C.Ford.     '  West.  Rev.,'  Sept.  1895. 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  363 

shall  be  allowed  to  control  all  human  life,  and  a  man  be 
reckoned  able  "  to  love  an  infinitely  extended  post-office  direc- 
tory." '  Neither  the  past  nor  the  future  of  evolution  has  any 
bearing  on  the  vital  question  about  the  nature  of  man  as  man, 
so  long  as  the  dialectic  of  the  moral  ideal  or  the  contradiction 
in  the  will  of  man  is  not  seriously  studied. 

Evolution  or  no  evolution,  there  is  a  permanent  individualism 
in  ethics  so  far  as  the  fulfilment  of  the  moral  ideal  goes.  The 
will  of  tlie  indimdual  man  has  to  be  made  perfect.  Nothing 
should  tempt  the  ethical  student  to  let  go  his  hold  on  this  fact. 
Kant  and  Schopenhauer  both  fasten  our  attention  permanently 
upon  the  contradiction  that  exists  in  the  nature  of  the  individual 
man  so  long  as  the  idea  of  duty  remains  unfulfilled.  In  this 
Hes  the  greatness  of  both.  It  is  useless  to  talk  about  society  to 
a  man  who  has  not  solved  the  question  of  the  dualism  or  the 
imperfection  in  his  own  life.  A  man,  in  fact,  cannot  "gain 
the  world"  if  he  "lose  his  own  soul." 

But  we  are  now  clearly  passing  out  of  the  study  of  ethics 
proper  into  the  study  of  the  metaphysical  postulates  of  action. 
We  may  think  of  one  or  two  practical  corollaries  with  which 
we  aro  naturally  left  after  reflection  upon  Schopenhauer's 
treatment  of  the  ethical  problem.  In  no  science  are  we 
more  apt  to  run  into  ultimate  ideas  instead  of  relevant  par- 
ticular facts  than  in  ethics.  Schopenhauer  in  his  ethics  is 
largely  the  victim  of  a  one-sided  devotion  to  such  ultimate 
things  as  "  supreme  goodness,"  "  supreme  badness,"  "  pure 
love,"  "transcendental  freedom."  He  is  right  in  connecting 
ethics  with  the  will,  and  right  too  in  insisting  that  all  the 
difficulties  of  ethics  centre  in  the  problem  of  the  goodness 
or  the  badness  of  man's  will,  but  he  tends  too  greatly  to 
subordinate   the  concrete   problems    of    ethics   to  the    meta- 

*  From  a  pamphlet  (printed  for  private  circulation)  entitled  '  Further  Deter- 
mination of  the  Absolute,'  by  J.  M.  E.  M'Taggart,  Trin.  Coll.,  Cam. 


364  Schopenhauer's  system. 

physic  of  ethics.  He  wished  to  simplify  conduct  too  mucli 
when  he  tried  to  reduce  it  to  one  or  two  elements  or  facts. 
He  gave,  indeed,  a  greater  prominence  than  most  other  philo- 
sophers to  the  notion  of  the  bad.  He  woidd  have  held  that 
only  he  who  knows  what  is  bad  knows  what  is  good,  and  he 
clearly  saw  that  this  knowledge  of  l)adness  implies  an  original 
taint  of  imperfection  in  the  will  of  man  which  no  amount  of 
moral  effort  on  his  part  will  enable  him  to  get  over.  But 
in  his  effort  to  give,  as  be  put  it,  a  really  serious  analysis  of 
conduct,  he  unduly  emphasised  .some  one  or  two  aspects  of 
man's  nature. 

The  extent  to  which  Scliopenhauer  is  a  victim  of  all  the 
false  philosophy  associated  with  the  idea  of  a  "  state  of  nature  " 
as  applied  to  man,  shows  how  important  it  is  for  an  ethical 
philosopher  to  have  an  exact  knowledge  of  the  traditional 
meaning  of  the  terms  which  he  uses.  Schopenhauer,  however, 
refers  to  history  only  when  it  suits  him  to  do  so  (saying,  for 
instance,  that  freedom  and  responsibility  have  a  meaning  only 
when  connected  with  theism) ;  and  at  other  times  he  com- 
pletely ignores  all  historical  considerations,  as  when  he  takes, 
so  to  speak,  the  eighteenth-century  theory  of  the  "  state  of 
nature  "  to  represent  truth  for  all  time.  The  treatment  that 
he  gave  of  the  dualism  in  the  will  of  man  savours  too  much 
of  the  difficulties  of  the  eighteenth  century  in  trying  to  over- 
come what  it  believed  to  be  the  natural  selfishness  of  the  in- 
dividual. He  was  right  in  insisting  that  there  is  an  ultimate 
contradiction  in  the  will  of  man,  and  therefore  that  from  the 
standpoint  of  ethics  alone  the  world  is  certainly  illusory.  Be- 
cause of  this  particular  embodied  selfishness  in  the  individual, 
the  moral  ideal — whether  it  is  unselfishness  or  something  more 
comprehensive  still — is  never  realised.  But  although  the  idea 
of  duty  or  obligation,  or  of  the  contradiction  that  exists  in  the 
will  of  man,  is  in  a  sense  an  ultimate  notion,  it  cannot  be 
understood  apart  from  history.     It  is  unfair,  however,  to  drag 


Schopenhauer's  moral  philosophy.  365 

Schopenhauer  before  this  tribunal.  It  was  not  the  past  he 
cared  about.  "  Two  philosophers  (Socrates  and  Kantj  have 
talked  about  the  reason.  I  have  talked  about  the  will.  To- 
gether we  constitute  philosophy.  Posterity  will  have  to  admit 
this,"  In  words  similar  to  these  would  he  express  his  feeling 
about  the  whole  course  of  human  thought. 

If  we  were  rigorously  to  apply  analysis  and  criticism  and 
historical  study  to  Schopenhauer's  ethical  terminology  and 
ethical  notions,  his  whole  ethical  philosophy  would  fall  to 
pieces  in  our  hands.  By  expressing  agreement  with  his  idea 
that  ethics  has  to  cio  chietly  with  the  will  of  man,  we  mean 
merely  that  man's  active  nature  is  the  permanent  thing  about 
him,  that  man's  will  rather  than  his  intellect  is  the  supreme 
object  of  study  in  ethical  philosophy.  On  the  possibility  of 
the  will  of  man  attaining  to  perfection  depends  his  fulfilment 
of  the  moral  ideal.  On  the  possibility,  therefore,  of  the  will 
of  man  being  somehow  made  perfect  does  the  real  meaning  of 
the  world  as  a  whole  depend.  True,  the  distinguishing  thing 
about  man  is  his  rational  consciousness,  the  fact  that  he  is 
able  to  act  with  intelligence,  while  brutes  act  only  in  obedience 
to  instinct.  But  man's  intellect  or  consciousness  means  only 
his  power  of  knov/ing  in  a  measure  the  direction  which  the 
development  of  his  life  is  taking  and  ought  to  take.  In  the 
language  of  Schopenhauer,  the  idea  is  secondary  to  the  will  so 
far  as  ethics  is  concerned. 

The  course  of  our  philosophical  examination  thus  far  has 
shown  us  that  the  real  world  depends  for  its  complete 
reality  and  development  on  the  reality  of  the  purpose  and 
effort  of  the  will  of  man.  The  will  of  man  is  the  reality 
which  ensures  the  (relative)  reality  of  all  other  things.  In  the 
chapter  on  the  Bondage  of  Man,  we  saw  how  man  is  not  free 
to  do  anything  else  than  seek  the  attainment  of  his  true  reality 
and  happiness  in  the  way  that  nature  has  ordained  he  shall 
seek  it.     In  the  last  two  chapters  we  found  that  the  reality  of 


366  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  life  of  man  seemed  to  depend  on  his  ability  to  make  beauty 
and  perfection  part  of  the  content  of  his  volition,  and  in  tlie 
present  chapter  we  have  seen  that  tlie  moral  imperfection  or 
contradiction  which  exists  in  his  individual  will  seems  to  stand 
in  the  way  of  that.  Neither  his  speculative  intellect  nor  his 
artistic  susceptibility  enables  him  to  see  things  out  of  relation 
to  his  will  and  the  purposes  of  his  will.  Just  because  morality 
has  to  do  with  the  will,  with  the  concrete  embodied  life  of  the 
individual,  it  can  never  attain  to  its  own  completion.  We  are 
compelled,  then,  to  study  a  still  higher  plane  of  human  ex- 
perience to  sec  if  we  can  thereon  attain  to  the  reality  (or 
id(>,ality)  of  which  we  are  in  search,  the  completely  rational 
and  harmonious  individual  human  will. 


367 


CHAPTER    VIII. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion. 

"  Un  chateau  imnienso,  an  frontispice  diuiuel  on  lisait,  '  Jo  n'appartiens 
i\  personne,  et  j'appnrtieiis  ii  tout  le  niornl;>:  vous  y  (jtiez  avant  que  d'y 
entrer,  vous  y  serez  encore,  quand  vou8  en  sortirez.'  "  ^ 

"Man  kann  in  walirer  Freilicit  lebun, 
Qnd  doch  niclit  ungebunden  sein."  ■^ 

"  Resolve  to  be  thyself  ;  and  know  tliat  he 
Who  linds  himself,  loses  his  misery."  ^ 

It  is  extremely  difficult  to  separate  Schopenhauer's  pliilosophy 
of  religion  from  his  philosophy  of  art  and  his  philosophy  of 
ethics.  All  these  three  things  represent  the  same  violent 
eftbrt  of  his  mind  to  overcome  the  defect  of  tlib  finite  or  the 
bondage  of  the  finite  will  and  intellect,  with  all  tl>e  sense  of 
illusion  and  repression  and  disappointment  that  accompanies 
human  life.  The  effort  in  each  case  reduces  itself  simply  to 
the  overcoming  in  thought  and  feeling  of  all  belief  in  the 
separate  or  individual  reality  of  things  and  human  beings,  and 
the  coming  to  regard  all  apparent  individuality  as  merely  a 
manifestation  of  the  will  under  the  conditions  of  time  and 
space.  It  is  hard  to  say  which  of  the  three  things,  art,  tran- 
scendental ethics,  or  religion,  is  of  the  greatest  logical  import- 
ance to  Schopenhauer.     In  treating  of   each  he  indulges  in 

*  Diderot,  Jiicques  le  Fataliste,  quoted  by  Schoj).,  Werke,  iii.  .550. 

2  Goethe,  Lieder.  '  M.  Arnold. 


368  Schopenhauer's  cYeTEM. 

superlatives.  The  mind  that  has  a  vision  of  the  Ideas ;  the 
will  that  exhibits  perfect  magnaniruity  and  unselfishness ;  the 
soul  thac  is  perfectly  resigned  after  conquering  in  itself  the 
will  to  live,  may  all  be  said  to  have  "  conquered  "  in  life,  to 
have  "  overcome  "  and  to  have  "  attained."  Eeligion,  indeed,  is 
seen  by  Schopenhauer  so  much  on  its  merely  formal^  and 
subjective  side  that  it  is  true  in  his  case,  as  perhaps  in  the 
caso  of  Goethe,  that  art  could  almost  supply  its  place ;  he  who 
has  real  "  art "  and  real  "  science,"  he  who  has  seen  the  Ideas 
and  who  knows  the  limitations  of  ordinary  knowledge,  how  it 
applies  merely  to  things  seen  under  the  conditions  of  our  in- 
tellect, has  religion — he  has  experienced  the  beatific  vision. 
And  there  is  another  reason  why  Schopenhauer's  religious 
ideas  cannot  be  thought  of  apart  from  art  and  ethics.  All 
positive  religion,  all  dogmatic  religion,  appears  to  him  to  indi- 
cate rather  a  defect  than  an  excess  or  a  due  amount  of  real 
religion  ;  it  is  only  for  those  who  have  not  art  and  perfect 
benevolence,  and  who  have  not  overcome  all  evil  desire  in 
their  own  hearts.  It  is  only  the  man,  as  it  were,  who  has  not 
art  and  perfect  knowledge  (including  self-knowledge)  who 
ought  to  have  recourse  to  positive  religion — "  Wer  diese  Beide 
niclit  hesitzt,  der  hahc  Eeligion." 

In  spite  of  this,  however,  it  may  be  said  that  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  of  religion  represents  the  highest  effort  of  his 
thought  to  overcome  the  dualism  or  the  contradiction  and 
illusion  which  he  found  in  all  experience  and  all  reality.  In 
his  aesthetics  and  ethics  Schopenhauer  failed  to  overcome  tliis 
dualism.  It  is  wrong,  as  we  have  seen,  to  think  that  art 
takes  us  out  of  the  world,  and  wrong  also  to  talk  as  if  the 
mere  metaphysical  perception  of  the  identity  of  all  living 
beings   actually   overcomes  the    selfishness    that   is    inherent 

'  Formal,  because  Schopenhauer  carea  veiy  little  about  the  actual  content  in 
dift'erent  religious  systems.  A  religion,  in  his  eyes,  needs  to  be  examined  only  as 
affecting  or  not  affecting  the  hunan  will. 


SCHOPENHAUER  S    PHILOSOPHY    OF   RELIGION.        369 

in  the  individual  will.     The  beautiful  must  always  be  seen 
in   a  medium   of   sense   or   imagination ;    and   morality   is   a 
matter  of  habit  and  training  and  social  experience  and  not  a 
mere  result  of  intellectual  perception.     With  his  philosophy  of 
religion  it  ought   to   be  different.     Eeligion   is    the  supreme 
effort  of  the  human  mind  to   reconcile   itself  to   the   short- 
comings of  life  and  to  the  fact  that  neither  the  ideal  of  beauty 
nor  the  ideal  of  goodness  (a  perfect  human  society)  is  com- 
pletely realised  in  the  world  as  we  know  it.     Schopenhauer 
knew  and  felt  this,  and  thus  religion  was  for  him  the  supreme 
witness  to  the  metaphysical  need  of  man.     "  Religion  is  the 
only  way  of  proclaiming  the  high  significance  of  life  to  the 
rough  sensibility  and  the  obtuse  understanding  of  the  majority 
of  men  who  are  sunk  in  base  pursuits  and  material  labour,  and 
of  bringing  it  home  to  them.     It  is  the  metai^hysic  of  the  pcoide 
which  one  has  to   give  over   to   them  and   pay  an   outward 
respect  to.     Just  as  there  is  a  folk-lore  and  a  wisdom  of  the 
people  expressed  in  proverbs,  so  there  must  be  a  raetaphysic  of 
the  people;    for  men   are   hopelessly   dependent   upon   some 
theory  or  other  of  life,  which  must  of  course  be  adapted  to 
their  powers  of  comprehension.   .   .    .   The  different  religions 
are  therefore  only  different  devices  by  which  the  people  take 
hold  of  and  visualise  for  themselves  the  truth  which  they  can- 
not apprehend  directly,  and  which   becomes  in  their  minds 
hopelessly   interwoven   with    the    framework    in   which    they 
cast  it." 

In  the  religious  consciousness  we  come  upon  a  higher  plane 
of  the  metaphysical  attitude  of  mind  than  even  in  art  or  in 
ethics.  The  formal  essence  of  religion,  if  we  may  so  speak,  is 
to  Schopenhauer  something  that  even  the  philosopher  himself 
cannot  dispense  with,  because  in  religion  we  find  a  supreme 
attempt  made  to  account  for  and  to  overcome  the  irrational 
element  in  man.  Seeing  that  the  irrational  element  does  exist 
in  the  will  of  man,  the  whole  universe  is  spoiled  or  vitiated 

2  A 


370  Schopenhauer's  system. 

for  him.  In  the  world  as  we  know  it,  "  art  for  art's  sake  " 
is  a  mere  dream,  and  pure  goodness  is  hardly  a  thing  that 
people  believe  in  as  a  reality.  "  But  since  our  state  is 
rather  something  which  had  better  not  be,  everything  about 
us  bears  the  trace  of  this — ^just  as  in  hell  everything  smells 
of  sulphur — for  everything  is  always  imperfect  and  illusory, 
everything  agreeable  is  displaced  by  something  disagreeable, 
every  enjoyment  is  only  a  half  one,  every  pleasure  introduces 
its  own  disturbance,  every  relief  new  difficulties,  every  aid  of 
our  daily  and  hourly  need  leaves  us  each  moment  in  the  lurcli 
and  denies  its  service,  the  step  upon  which  we  place  our  foot 
so  often  gives  way  under  us,  nay,  misfortunes  great  and  small 
are  the  elements  of  our  life ;  and,  in  a  word,  we  are  like 
Phineus,  whose  food  was  all  tainted  and  made  uneatable  by  the 
harpies."  ^  From  Schopenhauer's  writings  it  is  evident  that 
religion  was  a  most  serious  thing  to  his  own  mind,  and  the 
sighs  that  he  emits  over  the  vision  of  perfect  resignation  and 
perfect  goodness  in  the  truly  religious  man  are  to  be  taken  au 
sdrieux,  in  spite  of  his  numberless  emphatic  declarations  to  the 
effect  that  "  the  philosopher  must  be  before  all  things  an  un- 
believer," and  that  "nobody  who  really  philosophises  is  religious ; 
he  walks  without  leading-strings,  dangerous  but  free."  AVe 
may  deny  the  actual  world  in  our  thought  when  we  see  or 
contemplate  perfect  beauty  or  perfect  goodness,  but  this  mere 
denying  the  world  in  our  thoughts  does  not  destroy  the  world 
in  reality.  Eeligion  alone  pretends  to  answer  the  question, 
why  it  is  that  non- finality  and  non-attainnent  and  illusoriness 
seem  to  characterise  all  human  experience  and  all  human  life. 

I.  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion  is  very  different 

from    most   rationalistic    philosophies    of    religion.      That   it 

should  be  so  is  in  perfect  accord  with  the  character  oi  his 

system,  which  is  a  pervading  illusionism  on  the  assumption  q^ 

'  Werke,  iii.  662  ;  H.  and  K.,  iii.  387. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      371 

the  trutli  of  idealism.  Tlie  essence  of  the  illusionibm  and  the 
pessimism  that  Schopenhauer  teaches  consists  in  his  finding 
many  suppositions  upon  which  other  philosophers  build  their 
systems  to  be  false  and  fictitious.  Like  Spinoza,  who  may 
fairly  well  be  selected  as  a  type  of  the  broad'^^t  kind  of 
rationalism  in  religion,  Schopenhauer  represents  the  substi- 
tution of  a  simple  cosmic  emoticr  for  the  multiplicity  of 
philosophically  defective  creeds  current  among  men.  He  dis- 
tinguishes philosophy  and  knowledge  very  sharply  from  re- 
ligion and  belief :  "  religion  has  to  do  with  belief  and  philo- 
sophy has  to  do  with  rational  conviction."  "  Belief  and 
knowledge  do  not  comport  very  well  in  the  same  mind :  they 
are  like  the  wolf  and  the  sheep  in  the  one  fold ;  and  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  knowledge  is  the  wolf  who  is  sure  to  eat  up 
his  companion."  "  Eeligions,  properly  speaking,  do  not  ad- 
dress themselves  to  rational  conviction  founded  upon  proof, 
but  to  beliefs  supported  by  revelations."  Now  it  is  perfectly 
well  known  what  this  alleged  dualism  between  philosophy  and 
religion  amounts  to  in  the  way  of  ordinary  polemic,  and  it 
would  be  unfair  to  degrade  Schopenhauer  to  that  level. 

Philosophy  has  shown  a  thousand  times  that  all  knowledge 
rests  upon  certain  fundamental  assumptions  about  the  universe, 
assumptions  as  to  the  continuity  and  rational  coherence  of  all 
experience ;  and  religion  ought  never  to  lose  the  opportunity 
of  emphasising  the  truth  and  necessity  of  these  assumptions 
with  the  view  of  showing  the  great  extent  to  which  hdicf 
is  bound  up  with  them.  Assumptions  and  beliefs  have  to  do 
with  the  will,  with  the  necessity  that  is  laid  upon  us  to  act. 
And  so  Schopenhauer  should  not  have  separated  philosophy 
and  religion  so  much  from  one  another ;  the  fact  of  will  binds 
them  together.  It  might  be  held  that  religious  belief  is  not 
antithetical  to  knowledge  but  rather  a  mode  of  cognition — a 
sense  for  reality  —  that  is  radically  higher  than  ordinary 
knowledge.     If  all  knowledge  reposes  on  faith  or  belief  (as  it 


372  Schopenhauer's  system. 

does  to  men  like  Kant  and  Berkeley),  it  is  wrong  to  try  to 
mark  off  knowledge  sharply  from  belief.  Knowledge  both 
at  its  upper  and  its  lower  limits  passes  into  something  akin 
to  belief  —  in  the  former  case  a  volitional  consciousness  of 
the  self,  and  in  the  latter  an  immediate  feeling  of  the  relation 
that  realitij  sv.stains  to  our  vnll.  As  Schopenhauer  himself 
teaclies  us,  it  is  oily  the  middle  zone  of  knowledge  that  is 
clear  and  distinct  aud  definite.  ^  Schopenhauer,  in  fact,  was 
philosopiier  enough  to  see  that  knowledge  and  belief  run  into 
each  other,  and  hi?,  theory  of  knowledge  shows  this.  We 
could  easily  make  out  his  conception  of  religion  to  be  in 
reality  that  of  a  higher  kind  of  knowledge,  and  so  condemn 
him  on  the  ground  of  his  own  theory  for  insisting  too  strongly 
on  a  separation  between  knowledge  and  belief. 

One  of  the  material  advantages  to  be  derived  from  the 
study  of  Schopenhauer's  views  upon  religion  is  that  they  seem 
to  tell  us  something  about  the  kind  of  knowledge  we  ought 
to  expect  in  the  case  of  religion.  He  himself  builds  religion 
upon  certain  great  cosmic  intuitions.  These  intuitions  are 
apt  to  seem  devoid  of  content,  just  because  the  element  of 
knowledge  or  reality  is  mistalcenly  excluded  from  them.  But 
he  really  means  well  in  excluding  mere  knowledge  from  our 
religious  intuitions  and  perceptions,  even  if  he  does  indulge 
somewhat  in  mysticism  and  nihilism  (negation  of  the  reality 
of  the  physical  universe)  in  his  theory  of  religion.  He  insists 
on  the  fact  that  the  conception  belongs  to  the  middle  plane  of 
knowledge  which  lies  between  the  plane  of  ordinary  sense- 
perception  and  that  of  the  Ideas  proper.  He  does  not  allow 
that  knowledge  constitutes  the  ultimate  court  of  appeal  in 
matters  of  religion,  and  this  denial  is  sound  enough  if  an 
adequate  account  is  given  of  the  religious  emotions  or  in- 
tuitions which  are  professedly  higher  than  ordinary  knowledge. 
But  we  may  allow  the  antithesis  between  belief  and  know- 

^  Cf.  chap.  iii.  passim. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     373 

ledge  to  take  care  of  itself.  It  is  real  enough  in  Schopen- 
hauer, but  it  is  not  so  ultimate  as  his  words  might  make 
it  out  to  be,  And  then  Schopenhauer's  general  exaltation  of 
the  will  above  the  intellect,  of  the  practie^al  nature  as  greater 
than  the  speculative  intellect,  stands  for  the  fact  that  it  at 
best  is  very  foolish  to  make  too  much  of  knowledge,  seeing 
that  the  supreme  test  of  all  truth  is  a  general  consonance 
between  our  thoughts  and  reality  as  we  kr.ow  it  in  our 
practical  experience. 

The  true  reason  of  Schopenhauer's  hatred  of  ordinary  dog- 
matic religion  was  the  fact  that  he  believed  sucl.  religion  to 
have  no  effect  upon  the  will  at  all.  "  Where  is  the  religion 
whose  adherents  don't  consider  prayers,  praise,  and  manifold 
acts  of  devotion,  a  substitute,  at  least  in  part,  for  moral 
conduct  ? "  ^  He  held  that  people  were  wrong  in  saying 
that  they  lived  in  accordance  with  the  formulas  of  any 
religious  system  or  sect,  or  that  such  formulas  represented 
anything  outside  the  reality  of  their  own  experience  (the 
assertion  or  the  denial  of  the  will  to  live).  He  believed  that 
life  exhibited  its  own  eternal  and  natural  necessities,  and  that 
all  the  theorising  of  men  about  their  present,  future,  and  past 
actions,  apart  from  the  will  which  is  in  them  and  through 
them  as  it  is  in  all  things,  was  completely  illusory.  People 
only  theorise,  he  thought,  about  their  actions,  because  they 
see  them  through  the  medium  of  motives  and  therefore  dis- 
torted, appearing  to  be  separated  from  the  will  or  the  self 
while  they  are  not  really  so.  We  see  all  our  actions  through 
the  medium  of  our  intellect,  which  makes  them  appear  to  be 
different  from  what  they  really  are,  whereas  conduct  is  in 
reality  all  of  a  piece,  and  emanates  from  the  inborn  character. 
A  man  is  what  he  is  to  the  end  of  time,  and  acts  out  the  will 
that  is  in  him.  Even  the  acquired  character  of  a  man  is  not 
at  all  reliable  in  Schopenhauer's  eyes.  It  simply  means,  he 
'  Werke,  vi.  379  ;  B.  S.,  Religion  and  other  Essays,  p.  45. 


374  Schopenhauer's  system. 

says,  the  tendency  in  a  man  to  act  in  accordance  with  what 
he  tliinks  he  has  learned  about  himself  from  experience.  But 
the  fact  is,  Schopenhauer  would  say,  there  are  depths  in  a 
man's  nature  that  he  never  knows ;  the  natural  self  every 
now  and  then  simply  sets  at  defiance,  as  it  were,  all  that  we 
have  thought  we  knew  about  ourselves.  All  religions  are 
invented  to  save  man  from  himself,  and  none  of  them  whicli 
stop  short  of  the  idea  of  a  crucifixion  of  the  evil  self  by  death 
are  powerful  enough  to  do  this.  Even  the  religion  that 
Schopenhauer  himself  invents  cannot  save  man  in  this  world 
from  his  damnable  self,  from  the  damnable  will  to  live;  and 
so  the  world,  to  Schopenhauer,  is  essentially  illusory,  and  out 
of  illusionism  comes  pessimism.  There  is  only  one  thing  that 
is  absolutely  true  about  the  world,  according  to  Schopenhauer, 
and  that  is,  that  it  is  through  and  through  the  will  to  live. 
And  the  supremely  damnatory  thing  about  the  world  seems 
to  be,  that  we  are  born  (compelled  by  the  very  bent  of  our 
inte)lect)  to  think  that  it  is  a  little  better  than  it  is,  and  to 
draw  fig-leaves  of  casuistry  and  excuse  over  our  perfectly 
inevitable  actions.  Eeligious  theories,  he  maintains,  do  not 
affect  the  will  at  all,  but  are  simply  fictitious  and  imaginative 
descriptions  of  the  world  invented  to  satisfy  the  intellect, 
in  entire  forgetfulness  of  the  fact  that  our  intellect  is  given  us 
not  for  its  own  sake  but  only  for  the  sake  of  the  will  whose 
servant  it  is.  No  religion  so-called  was  to  him  really  a 
religion  which  merely  consisted  in  a  professed  adherence  to 
certain  dogmas  or  suppositions  about  the  nature  of  things. 
If  Schopenhauer  emphasised  anything  about  religion,  he  em- 
phasised this,  that  true  religion  uas  nothing  or  at  least  very 
little  to  do  with  any  mere  creed  about  the  nature  of  things. 
This  is  at  once  his  strength  and  his  weakness. 

Schopenhauer  is  inimical  to  all  rational  religion.  Religion, 
he  teaches,  has  primarily  to  do  not  with  the  intellect,  but  with 
the  will  and  the  feelings.     "  Virtue  and  holiness  do  not  pro- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     375 

ceed  from  reflections,  but  from  the  will."  The  philosophy  of 
religion,  if  it  perplexes  itself  about  the  nature  of  things  out'iide 
of  the  self,  has  forgotten  the  simplest  lesson  of  idealism,  that 
^he  external  universe,  so  far  from  being  able  to  affect  our  con- 
duct in  any  way,  ought  to  he  explained  from  the  standpoint  of 
the  self  or  the  will  of  man.  It  is  doubtless  with  the  "  trans- 
cendental "  signiticance  of  our  actions  that  religion  deals,  but 
the  true  transcendental  is  to  be  found  within  and  not  without, 
in  will,  not  in  the  external  world.  I  need  never,  for  example, 
have  any  fears  about  my  immortality,  according  to  Schopen- 
liauer,  because  the  will  in  me  no  more  dies  with  my  individual 
life  than  it  took  a  beginning  with  my  birth ;  ^  it  is  eternal ;  in 
my  life  my  ancestors  and  progenitors  are  crucified  afresh  for 
their  error  in  trying  to  will  as  finite  individuals,  and  I  myself 
have  already  asserted  the  will  to  live  in  a  thousand  ways,  and 
must  therefore  myself  be  punished  for  this  in  discontent  of 
soul.  "  So  much  the  less,  then,  should  it  come  into  our  mind 
to  regard  the  ceasing  of  life  as  the  annihilation  of  the  living 
principle,  and  consequently  death  as  the  entire  destruction 
of  man.  Because  the  strong  arm  which,  three  thousand 
years  ago,  bent  the  bow  of  Ulysses  is  no  more,  no  reflective 
and  well-regulated  understanding  will  regard  the  force  which 
acted  so  energetically  in  it  as  entirely  annihilated,  and  there- 
fore, upon  further  reflection,  will  also  not  assume  that  the 
force  which  bends  the  bow  to-day  first  began  with  this  arm. 
The  thought  lies  far  nearer  to  us,  that  the  force  which  earlier 
actuated  the  life  which  now  has  vanished  is  the  same  which 
is  active  in  the  life  whie)",  now  flourishes ;  nay,  this  is  almost 
inevitable."  ^ 

'  Schopenhauer  holds  both  birth  and  death  to  be  phenomenal  appearances,  and 
not  realities.  His  reason  for  doing  bo  is  that  time  is  only  a  category  of  the  intel- 
lect. This,  however,  is  wrong.  Duration  is  a  fact  of  the  world.  The  only  hope 
for  man  is  that  "  spiritualised "  volition  on  his  part  may  overcome  the  merely 
natural  and  temporal  basis  of  his  life. 

"^  Welt  als  Wille,  ii.  538  ;  H.  and  K.,  iii.  259,  260. 


376  .Schopenhauer's  s\stem. 

Actions  seem  to  be  many  and  diverse,  but  in  reality  there  is 
only  one  act,  the  eternal  action  of  the  world- will ;  the  world 
may  seem  to  be  a  manifold,  or  to  be  broken  up  into  many 
different  forces,  but  it  is  not  really  so ;  it  is  only  our  intellect 
which  makes  it  seem  so ;  there  is  one  will  and  one  continual 
willing  and  doing ;  this  is  the  nature  of  the  univei  -e,  and 
this  represents  the  one  element  of  truth  in  all  religions.  It 
may  be  said  that  this  is  simply  cosmic  monism  over  again, 
and  we  nmst  allow  that  it  is.  What  Schopenhauer  cares 
about  is  only  the  form  of  religion,  not  the  matter  of  the 
different  religions ;  and  his  significance  in  regard  to  this  very 
point  lies  in  the  fact  of  his  having  tried  to  connect  religion 
with  the  will  and  not  with  the  intellect  (as  other  philosophers 
did).  All  intellectual  religions  in  his  eyes  commit  the 
initial  and  unpardonable  sin  of  being  first  a  creed  about 
things,  and  not  a  feeling  about  our  own  will  or  our  own 
conduct.  We  shall  see  if  Schopenhauer's  connection  of  re- 
ligion with  the  will  enables  us  to  solve  any  of  the  problems 
that  had  to  be  left  unsolved  in  ethics,  and  any  problems  that 
are  not  much  considered  in  most  intellectual  disputes  about 
religion.     • 

(a)  The  kinds  of  religious  phenomena  that  are  studied  by 
Schopenhauer  have  all  to  do  with  the  will  and  our  practical 
nature  and  our  feelings.  In  art  he  is  a  would-be  Greek; 
in  ethics  he  is  an  eighteenth  -  century  philosopher ;  and  in 
religion  he  is  a  Christian  or  a  Buddhist,  with  all  the  dogmas 
or  the  "  external  supernatural "  simply  left  out.  He  felt 
what  both  Aristotle's  Ethics  and  the  Sermon  on  the  Mount 
teach  about  virtue  and  goodness  having  to  do  with  our 
desires  and  our  will,  and  he  felt  this  so  deeply  that  he  left 
the  rational  element  out  of  the  definition  of  virtue  almost 
entirely.  If  any  one  had  asked  him  what  virtue  meant, 
he  could  only  have  said  that  we  learn  its  meaning  through  a 
sympathy  which  makes  us  intuitively  feel  an  underlying  iden- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      377 

tity  in  all  things,  an  identity  of  the  life  of  other  jeings  with 
our  own  life.  And  so  it  is  the  conflict  of  the  will  of  man 
with  itself  that  is  to  be  overcome  in  real  and  practical  religion. 
Schopenhauer  is  always  talking  about  the  different  sects,  philo- 
sophical and  religious,  which  represented  the  overcoming  of 
the  conflict  of  the  will  as  ihe  greatest  thing  in  life,  and  about 
the  fact  of  its  being  overcome  as  the  essence  of  all  real 
religion.  He  speaks  of  the  Buddhists  in  this  connection, 
and  also — like  Voltaire — of  the  Quakers,  and  of  the  Shakers, 
and  the  Kappists,  and  the  monks  of  the  La  Trappe  order, 
of  the  Essenes,  of  Stoicism,  of  tlie  Christian  monks  and  the 
sHc/mata,  and  of  the  crucifixion  of  the  flesh  with  its  "  affections 
and  lusts."  It  is  the  possibility  and  tlie  actuality  of  sudden 
conversions  and  of  changed  lives,  of  the  true  vita  nuova  in 
which  the  cross  of  life  is  taken  up  and  carried,  and  in  which 
the  "  necessity "  of  nature  or  fate  becomes  divine  Providence 
— Oela  fjiolpa — or  divine  grace,  that  interest  him.  He  talks 
of  how  the  Abbe  Eanc(5  was  converted,  and  he  chronicles 
dozens  of  repentances  on  the  gallows  and  in  the  cell — any- 
thing that  can  effect  these  things  is  for  him  a  religion.  The 
superficial  eighteenth -century  deism  of  his  day  never  could 
affect  the  will  or  the  heart,  and  Schopenhauer  felt  that,  and 
h<ated  cordially  both  deism  and  liberal  Protestantism,  and 
also  all  metaphysical  religions  with  their  "  absolutes "  and 
"self-caused  causes."  He  says  that  Spinoza's  caiisa  mi  was 
just  like  the  picture  of  Baron  Munchausen  trying  to  lift  him- 
self and  his  horse  up  from  the  ground  by  his  own  pig- tail. 
The  Hegelian  philosophy  of  religion  had  no  effect  upon  the 
will,  and  therefore  could  not  be  said  to  be  a  religion.^ 

'  If  it  be  urged  that  Hegel's  philosophy  of  religion  is  only  a  philosophy  of 
religion,  and  therefore  not  necessarily  addressed  to  the  will,  it  may  at  once  be 
rejoined  that  many  students  find  Hegel  to  make  philosophy  actually  supplant 
religion.  And,  in  so  far  as  he  looks  upon  religion  merely  as  a  way  of  lookimj 
upon  things,  he  undoubtedly  tends  to  do  so.  Now  religion  cannot  be  understood 
save  as  firstly  an  attitude  of  the  wiU. 


378  SCHOPENHAUEU'S   SYSTEM. 

The  religious  literature  that  Schopenhauer  quotes  is,  in  the 
main,  first  and  foremost,  the  Vedas,  then  all  esoteric  Christian- 
ity whether  of  the  New  Testament  or  of  the  Christian  ascetics, 
the  Unneads  of  Plotinus  and  Jakob  Buhme  and  Meister 
Eckhart,  the  '  Deutsche  Theologie,'  Molinos,  Bunyan,  Augus- 
tine's '  Confessions,'  the  Pythagoreans,  the  poems  of  the  Sufis 
and  the  philosophy  of  the  Essenes,  Madame  do  Cuion,  Angelas 
Silesius,  etc. ;  the  sayings  of  all  the  schone  Seelen  of  religion, 
of  "  the  babes  and  sucklings "  who  desire  the  pure  milk  of 
the  word  that  they  may  "  grow  thereby,"  and  of  the  "  dying 
thieves  "  who  attribute  everything  to  divine  grace  and  feel  the 
need  of  redemption.  The  whole  of  the  liberal  Protestantism 
of  his  day,  with  its  optimism  and  common-sense  realism  and  its 
pleasure-morality  and  its  crass  theism,  seemed  to  him,  in  spite 
of  all  its  insistence  on  the  true,  the  beautiful,  and  the  good, 
to  be  intellectually  inferior  to  the  simplest  kind  of  Buddhism 
with  its  profound  conception  of  the  misery  that  is  inherent 
in  the  human  will.  The  religious  phenomena  that  Schopen- 
hauer deplores  are  naturally  to  some  extent  those  which  all 
philosophers  deplore :  the  appeal  in  ordinary  Protestantism 
to  tlie  mere  understanding  and  the  consequent  lack  of  true 
spirituality  ;  the  monopoly  of  the  means  of  grace  which  priest- 
hoods arrogate  to  themselves ;  the  explanation  of  conduct  by 
external  dogmas  and  formula?  instead  of  by  an  immanent 
necessity ;  the  confusion  of  love  and  sympathy  with  intellec- 
tual wisdom  and  creeds  about  the  nature  of  the  external  world; 
the  endless  wars  of  religion,  and  so  on.  He  talks  of  the 
practical  error  by  which  pseudo-worship  of  God  is  taken  to 
be  superior  to  duty  towards  men,  and  creeds  and  ceremonies, 
rather  than  the  fulfilment  of  the  ordinary  duties  of  life,  to 
be  the  peculiar  delight  of  the  Deity.  But  he  is  more  bitter 
in  his  condemnation  of  the  religion  of  the  reason  than  of 
anything  else ;  reason  only  systematises  the  experience  that 
we  have  about  life  and  can  never  take  us  beyond  that  ex- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     379 

perience.  All  vital  reliyion,  lie  iiisista,  comes  by  way  of  a 
kind  of  revelation  or  intuition,  tlio  chief  ingredient  in  which 
is  the  self-revelation  of  the  evil  in  one's  own  nature  and  of 
one's  own  inability  to  overcome  the  conflict  that  exists  in 
the  will. 

(/3)  It  is  an  essential  part  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of 
reli<:;ion  to  point  out  the  formal  defects  of  all  the  most  gen- 
erally accepted  religious  systems — of  all  systems  which  are,  to 
begin  with,  merely  affairs  of  the  intellect,  invented  one  after 
the  other  to  supplant  each  other  for  merely  logical  reasons. 
He  is  far  too  impatient  with  what  he  considers  to  be  the  eternal 
irrelevancy  of  all  merely  intellectual  philosophies  of  religion  to 
think  out  even  a  natural  or  an  anthropological  history  of  them 
all.  That  might  be  a  task  which  the  ordinary  scientific  inves- 
tigator would  undertake,  but  it  is  one  for  which  Schopenhauer 
himself  had  neither  sympathy  nor  patience.  He  must,  hov/ever, 
get  a  certain  amount  of  credit  for  suggesting  that  an  anthro- 
pological treatment  of  religious  systems  would  be  the  best  way 
of  setting  forth  their  relative  truth  or  falsity.  He  says  that 
all  the  proofs  of  God's  existence  are  at  bottom  not  theoretical 
but,  as  it  were,  emotional,  keraunological,  arising  out  of  human 
need.  "  Theism  is  no  creation  of  the  intellect,  but  of  the  will. 
If  it  were  by  origin  a  purely  theoretical  affair,  how  could  all 
its  proofs  be  so  faulhj  ?  It  arises  out  of  the  will,  and  in  the 
following  way.  The  continual  need  which  always  troubles  the 
heart  (will)  of  man,  and  sometimes  throws  it  into  deep  ex- 
citement, and  always  keeps  it  in  a  condition  of  fear  and  hope, 
while  the  things  about  which  he  hopes  and  fears  are  not  within 
his  control  at  all,  while  indeed  the  causal  sequence  which  could 
bring  them  about  can  be  traced  only  a  very  short  way  by  his 
intellect; — this  sense  of  need  and  continued  fear  and  hope 
causes  him  to  invent  th-^  hypothesis  of  personal  beings  on 
whom  all  things  depend."^ 

1  Erliiut.  zur  Kant.  Phil.,  AVerke,  v.  126. 


;380  Schopenhauer's  system. 

In  this  idea  there  is  perhaps  more  objectivity  and  historical 
truth  than  in  tlie  idea  wliicli  some  Hegelians  liave  tliat  reHf,'i- 
ous  systems  indicate  simply  phases  of  the  evolution  of  the 
intellectual  consciousness  that  man  has  of  the  world.  The 
only  objective  test  after  all  of  the  reality  of  a  religion  is 
its  suitability  to  our  practical  human  needs.  Roughly  speak- 
ing, the  Hegelian  philosophy  of  religion  comes  to  be  simply  a 
conception  of  God  as  spirit,  or  of  the  universe  as  permeated 
by  spirit ;  but  such  a  conception  carries  no  real  satisfaction 
with  it.  Spirit  is  only  an  accompaniment  of  life,  for  life  as 
we  know  it  is  always  psychical  as  well  as  physical.  Objec- 
tively regarded,  animism  is  just  as  good  as  pantheistic  spiritual- 
ism. We  must  be  shown  that  the  Spirit  of  the  world  is  a 
spirit  that  feels  our  human  needs  and  human  misery.  A 
merely  idealistic  principle  never  seems  real  enough  as  an 
explanation  of  the  present  world  with  its  infinite  effort  and 
struggle  and  pain.  If  we  could  think  of  something  that  the 
world-will  is  trying  to  realise  in  the  case  of  the  finite  indi- 
vidual, then  we  should  have,  perhaps,  a  principle  which  would 
to  a  large  extent  reconcile  us  to  the  world  as  we  find  it.  For 
these  and  similar  reasons  we  may  go  as  far  as  we  like  with 
Schopenhauer  in  thinking  of  the  formal  defects  of  all  merely 
intellectual  religious  systems,  if  we  succeed  in  showing  that 
there  is  a  will  at  work  in  the  world  which  sustains  living 
relations  of  help  and  sympathy  to  human  beings.  The 
Hegelian  too,  it  is  true,  can  always  point  out  to  us  the  formal 
defects  of  theism  and  of  materialism  and  of  Spinoza's  philo- 
sophy of  substance,  and  so  on ;  but  he  is  always  anxious  to 
conserve  the  element  of  truth  that  he  finds  to  exist  in  each 
of  these  faulty  systems,  and  to  keep  it  for  his  final  "  notion " 
or  "  idea  "  which  he  is  going  to  deify.  But  how  can  a  merely 
logical  philosophy  know  exactly  what  to  deify  ?  Or  why 
should  it  deify  any  one  thing  rather  than  any  other  ? 

The  difficulty  is,  of  course,  to  a  certain  extent,  the  same  for 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     381 

Scliopenhauer  ns  for  a  follower  of  Hegel.  No  mnn  can  bo  sure 
that  what  ho  in  his  mere  thoui^hts  takes  to  bo  of  tho  esHonco 
of  the  universe  is  what  the  universe  itself  regards  io  be  its 
essence.  But  then  Schopenhauer  has  his  principle  of  vh?  w:M, 
and  we  have  suggested  that  there  is  a  real  teleology  inherent 
in  that.  Tho  highest  evolution  of  the  will  (tho  life  of  man) 
represents  that  wliich  the  world -will  has  pledged  itself  to 
bring  to  perfection.  The  more  idea  or  tho  mere  notion  of 
self-consciousness  is  indeed  empty  without  the  will,  without 
purposive  activity.  The  "  idea  that  thinks  itself,"  or  the  world 
that  "  comes  to  self-consciousness,"  is  an  empty  conception 
unless  we  know  what  the  self-consciousness  is  going  to  do 
with  itself ;  and,  as  Schopenhauer  suggests,  every  thought  of  an 
end  or  purpose  in  the  world  is  a  more  or  less  direct  appeal  to 
the  will  rather  than  to  the  intellect.  Thus  Schopenhau<;r  was 
enabled  to  infuse  an  element  of  reality  into  tho  philosophy 
of  religion.  The  true  way,  he  insists,  of  thinking  of  the  differ- 
ent religions,  and  of  classifying  tliem,  is  in  accordance  with 
their  effect  upon  the  will.  They  must  view  the  will  as  either 
attaining  or  not  attaining  to  what  it  strives  for.  All  religions, 
he  says  again  and  again,  are  simply  either  optimistic  or  pessi- 
mistic ;  they  say  either  "yes"  or  "no"  to  man's  need  of  salvation 
or  help  in  the  battle  of  life.  "  The  chief  difference  among  all 
religions  cannot  be  said  to  consist — as  it  is  generally  made  to 
do — in  the  fact  of  their  being  monotheistic,  or  polytheistic,  or 
pcantheistic,  or  atheistic,  but  only  in  the  fact  of  their  being 
optimistic  or  pessimistic."  And  again,  "Atheism  is  not  synony- 
mous with  the  want  of  religion."  This  to  him  is  the  "  true 
inwardness  of  the  matter,"  and  the  less  concealment  there  is 
about  it  the  better.  Eeligions  either  say  that  life  is  good 
enough  as  it  is  or  that  it  is  not.  Optimism  to  Schopenhauer 
is  in  the  first  place  a  "  shallow  "  and  "  ignorant "  philosophy, 
and  then,  secondly,  a  really  "  perverse  "  and  "  wicked  "  reading 
of  the  world  as  we  know  it  and  see  it.     It  is  not  merely  that 


382  Schopenhauer's  system. 

there  is  a  discrepancy  between  the  ideal  and  the  real  in  the 
world ;  it  is  that  this  discrepancy  is  in  the  nature  of  things. 
To  be  finite  is  to  be  subjected  to  a  certain  amount  of  illusory 
experience ;  this  is  the  essence  of  Schopenhauer's  religious 
philosophy.  Religions  should,  he  thinks,  occupy  theraselves 
before  everything  with  the  fact  that  life  as  we  find  it  is 
full  of  contradiction  and  illusion.  We  seem  in  the  world  to 
be  striving  for  something  that  we  never  attain  to.  The  first 
thing  we  ought  to  ask  about  a  religion  is,  he  holds,  "  Does  it 
provide  a  scheme  of  salvation  or  does  it  not  ?  for  if  it  does 
not,  it  is  a  mere  intellectual  house  of  cards."  For  the  comfort- 
able secularist  who  would  ask :  What  is  salvation  ?  out  of  a 
satisfied  conceit  that  the  world  is  very  well  as  it  is,  Schopen- 
hauer has  nothing  but  boundless  c  ntempt  and  aversion — the 
man  is  simply  not  taking  things  seriously,  he  would  say. 

Schopenhauer's  own  courage  is  seen  in  this  very  fact  of  liis 
proposing  to  divide  religions  by  a  standard  which  practically 
rules  most  of  them  on  the  negative  side.  There  is  something 
about  his  wholesale  condemnation  of  all  human  religions  which 
might  captivate  the  believer  in  a  positive  revelation.  But  how 
many  representatives  even  of  revealed  religion  maintain  the 
world  to  be  literally  and  actually,  and  not  figuratively  and 
imaginatively,  a  Jammerthal — a  vale  of  woe  ?  or  how  many  of 
them  continue  to  believe  in  man's  real  need  of  redemption 
from  his  evil  and  wayward  self  ?  Eeal  Christianity  to  Schop- 
enhauer is  frankly  pessimistic  about  tho  world  ^'"^  live  in. 
It  realises  the  depth  of  the  religious  problem.  "  The  inmost 
kernel  of  Christianity  is  the  truth  that  suffering — the  Cross — 
is  the  real  end  and  object  of  life.  Hence  Christianity  con- 
demns suicide  as  thwarting  this  end ;  whilst  the  ancient 
world,  taking  a  lower  point  of  view,  held  it  in  approval,  nay, 
in  honour."  ^  We  shall  see  that  there  are  some  things  about 
Christianity,  or  the   scheme  of  which  it  forms  a  part,  that 

^  B.  Saunders,  Studies  in  Pessimism,  p.  48. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      383 

Schopenhauer  cannot  be  held  to  have  very  well  understood. 
But  he  is  at  one  with  the  Christian  religion  in  emphasising 
as  strongly  as  possible  the  helplessness  of  man  to  work  out 
bis  own  salvation  and  to  deliver  himself  from  the  inward  con- 
tradiction that  characterises  his  whole  life, 

(7)  Only  the  most  salient  and  relevant  points  in  Schopen- 
hauer's condemnation  of  existent  or  historical  philosophies  of 
religion  need  be  touched  upon  here.     Indeed  most  students 
are   fully  aware  of  the   radical  shortcomings  of   all  religious 
theories  which  bear  some  one  distinctive  logical  label ;  they 
are    all    incapable   of    standing    alone    as   a   complete    philo- 
sophy of  the  world  ;  they  have  a  meaning  only  within  the 
limits   of   some  special  antithesis.     Atheism,  fur  example,  is 
only  intelligible  in  relation  to  theism.     And  then  theism,  as 
Schopenhauer  suggests,  can  hardly  present  itself    anywhere 
without    feeling    conscious     of    its     parentage     in     Judaism. 
Schopenhauer's  greatest  animus  is  against  theism  and  liberal 
Protestantism    and   the    philosophies    that  have    taken    their 
origin  therefrom  without  having  the  honesty  to  say  so.     In 
this  he  is  at  one  with  much  aesthetic  and  poetic  feeling,  which 
generally  prefers  pantheism  to  theism.     If  we  take  the   re- 
ligions  that  are  based  upon   such   apparently  "  immediately 
given  "  elements  as  nature  and  the  reason  of  man,  naturalism 
(or  materialism)  and  rationalism  in  all  their  forms,  we  must 
agree  with  our  author's  thought  upon  the  matter.     Naturalism, 
he  says,  is  physics  without    metaphysics  ;  it  makes  out   the 
nafura    naturata    to    be    natura    naturans  —  created     nature 
to   be    creative    nature.      Then    as    a    religion    it    does    not 
meet   the    many  needs    of    the    human    spirit,    for    "  Nature 
is   not    really    benign     and     beautiful,"    but    "  devilish    and 
cruel."     Materialism  is  nothing  but  "  formulated  naturalism  " ; 
to  begin  with,  it  takes  the  objective  world  to   exist  on  its 
own  account,  which  is   nonsense ;  and    then,   so   far  as   the 
religious   life    is    concerned,   it    does    not    make   for  tliat   at 


384  Schopenhauer's  system. 

all,  but  rather  for  sensualism  and  bestiality  and  the  crass 
affirmation  of  the  will  to  live  generally.  Kationalism,  again, 
is  to  Schopenhauer  at  bottom  nothing  but  a  fatuous  reliance 
on  the  "  concept "  and  on  the  pure  reason  as  guides  in  life. 
In  the  first  place,  it  can  never  elevate  us  beyond  the  present 
world,  but  only  enable  us  to  systematise  it  to  a  small  extent. 
And  secondly,  it  can  never  pretend  to  guide  life  without 
some  reference  to  the  feelings  and  the  impulses  and  the  needs 
of  man,  which  is  practically  a  surrender  of  its  professed  re- 
liance upon  the  reason  alone.  Stoicism — to  which  Schopen- 
hauer often  refers — was  a  sort  of  reductio  ad  absurdum  of 
ethical  rationalism ;  it  obtained  a  moral  victory  over  the 
world  either  by  a  fatalistic  acquiescence  in  the  nature  of 
things,  or  by  the  suppression  of  that  which  gives  life  its 
whole  content  and  richness  and  meaning — the  various  feel- 
ings and  emotions.  Eationalism  in  the  form  of  modem 
free- thought  or  anti-supernaturalism  is  to  Schopenhauer  about 
the  poorest  and  the  blindest  and  the  most  ignorant  of  all 
philosophies.  Both  the  rationalists  and  their  opponents,  the 
mere  supernaturVxists,  are  in  his  eyes  "  very  poor  creatures 
indeed."  They  both  argue  as  if  everything  in  religion 
hinged  upon  the  historic  truth  of  a  few  propositions  or  narra- 
tives, and  thus  both  ignore  the  nature  of  spiritual  truth ;  the 
rationalist,  its  mystical  character ;  and  the  literalist,  its  real 
inwardness  and  universality.  The  rationalists  may  make  a 
stand,  he  says,  for  honesty,  but  they  are  poor  blind  creatures 
at  best,  and  they  always  fall  ?  prey  to  the  commonest  kind  of 
materialism  and  sensualism.  We  can  estimate  the  value  of 
this  when  we  remember  how  easily  some  members  of  the 
"  Hegelian  Left "  as  a  matter  of  fact  passed  from  rationalism 
into  undisguised  sensualism  and  materialism. 

Then  there  are  the  philosophies  which  take  up  some 
attitude  to  the  idea  of  God — pantheism  and  atheism.  Scho- 
penhauer says,  and  says  rightly,  that  both  of  these  are  de- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      385 

fective  logically.     They  both,  in  fact,  presuppose   an  initial 
theism.     This  is  perfectly  true.     Pantheism  is  a  mere  after- 
thought, invented  to  get  over  the  difficulty  of  a  God  that  is 
merely  "  outside  of "  nature,  and  not  "  in  "  it,  and  not  "  in  " 
man.     It   is,   too,  a   contradictory   expression;   for    how  can 
there  be  a  supreme  being  when  all  is  one  and  all  is  God  ? 
It  suggests,  he  aptly  says,  the  way  Eousseau  has  of  calling 
the  people  le  souverain,  or   a  king  who,  out  of   a   desire   to 
destroy   the    power   of    his  nobles,  hits  upon  the   device    of 
ennobling  everybody.     Indeed,  to  say  that  all  is  God  is  just  a 
polite  way  "  of  bowing  God  out  of  the  universe."     "  It  is  only 
dishonest  Protestant   liberalism  which    has   made  Spinoza   a 
calendar  saint;  Spinoza  was  really  an  arch-atheist,  and  it  is 
only  German  philosophy  which  has  ever  made  people  tliink 
anything  else — in  France  in  the  eighteenth  century  everybody 
at  once  perceived  the  subversive  character  of  Spinoza's  teach- 
ing."   This  is  in  the  main  quite  satisfactory.    All  the  Hegelian 
philosophy  of  religion  is  to  Schopenhauer  simply  "  Spinozism 
dressed  up " ;  and  the  "  faithful "  among  Protestants  and  all 
true  Catholic  Christians  have  always  seen  it  to  be  such,  and 
as  such   atheistical   or  at  least  negative  of  a  personal  God. 
"Pantheism  assumes   that   the  creative   God   is   himself  the 
world   of   infinite   torment,   and,   in    this    little   world    alone, 
dies  every  second,  and  that  entirely  of  his  own  will  ;  which 
is   absurd.       It    would    be    much    more    correct    to    identify 
the  world  with    the  devil,  as    the   venerable    author  of   the 
'  Deutsche  Theologie '  has,  in  fact,  done   in  a  passage  of  his 
immortal  work,  where  he    says,  '  Wherefore    the    evil  spirit 
and  nature  are  one,  and  where  nature  is  not  overcome  neither 
is  the  evil  adversary  overcome.'  "  ^ 

Atheism  our  author  affirms  to  be  logically  defective,  for  the 
reason  that  it  is  firstly  a  negative  philosophy,  and  secondly, 
that  it  is  not  really  atheism  but  simply  non-Judaism  (for  to 

*  B.  Saunders,  Religiou,  &c.,  p.  67. 
2  B 


386  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Schopenhauer  the  Jews  were  the  only  people  who  as  a  nation 
attained  to  the  conception  nf  a  personal  God).  These  two 
reasons  when  fully  thought  out  warrant  our  passing  over 
atheism.  It  is  no  philosophy  in  itself,  nothing  that  admits 
of  a  positive  examination. 

Upon  the  great  historical  religions  Schopenhauer's  opinions 
are  as  usual  fundamental  and  to  a  large  extent  final, — at  least 
from  his  point  of  view.  We  may  omit  the  thousand  and  one 
things  that  he  says  about  the  merits  of  "  the  Ancients "  (die 
Altai),  and  state  only  what  he  judges  to  be  their  defects.  "  In 
an  ethical  and  religious  regard  the  Ancients  stood  very  far  back 
indeed.  In  ancient  times  the  whole  character  of  all  public 
life,  of  the  state  and  of  religion,  and  of  private  life,  was  a 
decided  aflSrmation  of  the  will  to  live."  The  Greeks,  as  we 
know,  felt  thoroughly  at  home  in  the  world.  Sin  and  disease 
and  the  ugly  were  only,  in  their  eyes,  defects  in  things,  repre- 
senting in  fact  things  that  were  simply  imperfectly  formed  (or 
"  turned  off  ")  by  nature.  Indeed  the  cultivated  Greek  mind 
could  not  think  of  disease  and  of  evil  as  positive  things  at  all. 
It  is  true  that  the  Greeks  had  harpies  and  monsters  and  other 
creations  which  expressed  their  sense  of  what  was  ugly  and 
deformed,  but  these  very  creations  rather  bear  testimony  to 
their  love  of  order  and  symmetry  as  that  which  alone  is 
strictly  intelligible  in  the  world.  As  for  the  Eomans,  their 
organising  will  and  their  iron  tread  over  the  greater  part 
of  the  then  known  world  represent  as  decided  an  affirma- 
tion of  life  as  could  well  be  imagined.  "  The  Christian 
theory  of  original  sin  and  salvation  was  something  utterly 
foreign  to  the  Greeks  and  Eomans  as  peoples  who  seemed 
to  enter  directly  into  life,  and  whose  thoughts  never  seriously 
went  beyond  it."  "  The  Ancients,  although  far  advanced  in 
almost  everything  else,  remained  children  so  far  as  the  chief 
thing  (religion)  was  concerned,  and  were  in  fact  surpassed 
by  the  Druids,  who   taught   metempsychosis.      That   one  or 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     387 

two  philosophers,  such  as  Pythagoras  and  Plato,  thought 
differently,  does  not  alter  matters  much."  ^  Notliing  that  may 
be  said  about  the  melancholy  of  the  Greeks  or  the  superstition 
of  the  Eomans  can  detract  from  the  truth  of  this  statement, 
nor  all  that  might  be  written  about  the  extent  to  which  the 
Greeks  and  the  Romans  were  conscious  of  having  their  golden 
age  rather  behind  them  than  in  front  of  them.  The  Greeks 
and  the  Eomans  had  no  solution  of  the  pain  and  the  misery  of 
the  finite  as  such.  Achilles  and  Cato,^  in  thinking  of  death, 
both  exhibit  that  absence  of  the  feeling  of  alienation  of  the 
human  personality  from  the  world  and  the  infinite,  which  is  a 
mark  of  the  spirit  that  has  gone  far  down  into  the  depths  of 
human  misery. 

The  Hebrews  are  the  other  people  among  whom  the  modern 
world  cares  to  study  its  "  origins,"  and  the  Hebrews  too  Schopen- 
hauer was  able  to  pass  over  very  easily.  He  finds  among  tliem 
the  two  things  that  are  integral  parts  or  presuppositions  of 
theism — realism  and  optimism  ;  for  theism  takes  this  natural 
world  to  be  absolutely  real,  and  life  to  be  a  present  that  is 
made  to  u.s,  and  that  is  agreeably  accepted  by  us  as  such. 
"The  fundamental  characteristics  of  the  Jewish  religion  are 
realism  and  optimism,  views  of  the  world  which  are  closely 
allied ;  they  form,  in  fact,  the  conditions  of  theism.  For 
theism  looks  upon  the  natural  world  as  absolutely  real,  and 
regards  life  as  a  pleasant  gift  bestowed  upon  us.  On  the  other 
hand,  the  fundamental  characteristics  of  the  Brahman  and 
the  Buddhist  religions  are  idealism  and  pessimism,  which  look 
upon  the  existence  of  the  world  as  in  the  nature  of  a  dream, 
and  life  as  the  result  of  our  sins.  In  the  doctrines  of  the 
Zendavesta,  from  which,  as  is  well  known,  Judaism  sprang,  the 
pessimistic  element  is  represented  by  Ahriman.  In  Judaism, 
Ahriman  has  only  a  subordinate  position ;  but,  like  Ahriman, 

1  Welt  al8  Wille,  ii.  722. 

*  Cf.  Horace,  Carm.  i.  xii. — "Catonis  nobile  letum." 


388  Schopenhauer's  system. 

he  is  the  lord  of  snakes,  scorpions,  and  vermin.  But  the 
Jewish  system  fortliwith  employs  Satan  to  correct  its  funda- 
mental error  of  optimism,  and  in  the  Fall  introduces  the  element 
of  pessimism,  a  doctrine  demanded  hy  the  most  obvious  facts 
of  the  world.  There  is  no  truer  idea  in  Judaism  than  this, 
although  it  transfers  to  the  course  of  existence  what  must  be 
represented  as  its  foundation  and  antecedent."^  Now  after 
Kant,  as  Schopenhauer  suggests,  this  kind  of  theism  is  not 
possible  as  either  a  logical  cr  a  real  resting-place  for  human 
thought.  It  is  really  a  cardinal  sin  in  philosophy  to  think  of 
the  world  as  first  real  enough  "out  there"  in  its  own  way, 
perfectly  "  objective "  and  independent  of  spirit,  and  then  in 
naive  ignorance  to  ask  for  a  cause  of  that  world.  If  we  coidd 
find  a  cause  for  such  a  world  we  should  immediately  want  a 
cause  for  that  alleged  cause.  And  then  if  life  is  really  a 
positive  thing,  beautiful  and  good  on  its  own  account,  wliy 
should  we  desire  to  seek  help  from  the  gods  ?  People  who 
argue  for  theism  do  not  really  know  what  they  are  doing. 
Theism  is  only  a  temporary  stage  of  thought,  a  partial  aspect 
of  reality.  There  is  no  personal  God  outside  of  the  world  of 
men  and  things.  In  modern  times  both  Goethe  and  Carlylf 
emphasised  this  idea.  It  is  quite  enough,  in  short,  for  our 
purpose  in  unfolding  Schopenhauer's  religious  ideas  to  say, 
as  a  leading  writer  on  theism  has  said,  "  History  proves  mere 
theism  insufficient."  ^  A  mere  theism  is  never  a  satisfactory 
thing  for  the  human  mind  to  think.  A  God  to  whom  we  are 
bound  in  a  merely  external  way  cannot  be  the  Father  of  our 
spirits.  All  people  who  can  think  and  feel  infinitely  prefer 
pantheism  to  theism.  Islamism  is  for  Schopenhauer  the 
"  worst  of  all  religions,"  because  it  is  perhaps  most  opti- 
mistic, and  because  in  it  we  find  "  the  most  miserable  and  the 
poorest  form  of  theism."     Buddhism  in  his  eyes  is  the  highest 

^  Werke,  vi.  405  ;  B.  S.,  Religion  and  other  Essays,  p.  114. 
'^  Professor  Flint,  The  Baird  Lecture,  187ff,  p.  303  fiF. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     389 

of  all  religions,  because  it  is  the  most  thoroufjlily  atheistic  and 
the  most  thoroughly  pessimistic ;  it  is  farthest  removed,  as  it 
were,  from  any  merely  intellectual  creed  about  things — its 
preliminary  acceptance  of  the  philosophy  of  idealism  apart — 
and  from  that  self-satisfied  philosophy  called  optimism,  which 
is  perfectly  well  contented  with  things  as  they  are.  Optimism 
he  regards  as  really  the  supreme  sin  against  the  Holy  Ghost, 
and  as  such  philosophically  unpardonable.  "  There  is  a  most 
glaring  difference  between  the  ethics  of  the  Greeks  and  of  the 
Hindus.  In  the  one  case  (with  the  exception  it  must  be  con- 
fessed of  Plato)  the  object  of  ethics  is  to  enable  a  man  to  lead 
a  happy  life ;  in  the  other,  it  is  to  free  and  redeem  him  from 
life  altogether — as  is  directly  stated  in  the  very  first  words  of 
the  Sankhya  Kariha."  ^ 

It  would  be  superfluous  to  enumerate  all  the  defects  that 
Schopenhauer  points  out  in  organised  Catholicism  and  in 
disorganised  Protestantism.  The  pulpit  is  everything  to  the 
latter,  the  mere  appeal  to  the  understanding ;  and  this  is  a 
Samson-like  way  of  pulling  down  the  whole  edifice,  because 
the  appeal  to  the  understanding  has  inevitably  led,  and  inevit- 
ably leads,  to  what  is  called  rationalism  or  anti-supernaturalism. 
The  altar  is  everything  to  the  former,  the  presentation  of  the 
suffering  and  dying  Saviour  and  of  the  divine  pity  and  humili- 
ation. As  never  wavering  about  man's  need  of  redemption, 
Catholicism  is  superior  to  Protestantism,  but  its  conceit  and 
absurdity  in  doling  out  supernatural  help  to  men  in  infini- 
tesimal doses  from  a  monopolised  reservoir  are  too  shameless 
for  anything.  Eeal  religion  cannot  be  brought  into  man 
from  without,  and  in  the  will  and  the  heart  alone  can  true 
repentance  and  magnanimity  of  soul  be  made  manifest.  All 
organised  Christianity  represents  to  Schopenhauer  simply  the 
metaphysic  of  the  people — Volksmetaphysik.  He  practically 
thinks  that  if  it  could  "  take  away "  all  its  paraphernalia  of 

*  Werke,  vi.  334  ;  Saunders.  Studies,  p.  25. 


390  Schopenhauer's  system. 

creeds  and  dogmas  and  institutions,  the  Spirit  or  the  Will  of 
the  world  would  be  "  open  "  before  us. 

It  is  to  be  remembered,  however,  about  both  Catholicism 
and  Protestantism,  as  indeed  for  that  matter  about  Judaism 
too,  that  tliey  represent  stages  in  the  evolution  of  a  great 
religious  movement,  and  that  they  are  intelligible  only  as 
such.  And  here  again  it  is  to  be  said  that  if  there  is  one 
thing  that  Schopenhauer  could  not  understand,  and  did  not 
care  to  understand,  it  was  history  and  historical  development.' 
Consequently  he  cannot  be  regarded  as  having  understood 
religious  systems  whose  historical  character  is  part  of  their 
very  essence.  "We  must  agree  that  most  of  the  things  which 
he  criticises  and  rejects  in  his  search  for  a  final  philosophy 
of  practical  religion  are  certainly  halves  rather  than  wholes 
— imperfect  things :  they  cannot  stand  by  themselves.  As 
already  suggested,  a  Hegelian  might  say  that  they  represent 
only  stages  in  the  evolution  of  the  religious  consciousness. 
Schopenhauer  neither  affirms  nor  denies  that ;  in  fact,  that 
is  clearly  not  his  point.  All  intellectual  philosophies  of 
religion  are  simply  to  him  flagrantly  inadequate  to  the  needs 
of  human  life ;  they  cannot  work  out  for  humanity  the  salva- 
tion it  needs.  In  this  sense  all  good  people  are  atheists  aloug 
with  Schopenhauer.  This  is  why  men  like  David  Hume  and 
Voltaire  are  immortal.  They  both  saw  and  taught  the  utter 
inadequacy  of  the  mere  philosophy  of  the  idea,  firstly,  to 
explain,  and  secondly — what  is  greater  than  explaining — to 
atone  for  the  facts  of  life.  A  Lisbon  earthquake  or  the 
suffering  of  any  one  individual  is  enough  to  refute  a  super- 
ficial optimistic  philosophy  of  the  idea.  We  cannot  say  of 
the  world  as  we  see  it  with  our  eyes  and  our  reason  that 
it  is  "very  good."  Three-fourths  of  life  is  unfulfilled  pur- 
pose and  struggle,  and  all  life  is  one  continued  effort  after 
development.  No  external  philosophy  such  as  theism  can 
^  Cf.  chap.  vi.  and  the  close  of  chap.  vii. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     391 

in  Schopenhauer's  eyes  be  reconciled  even  with  the  idea  of 
human  liberty,  not  to  speak  of  the  suffering  of  life.  "  Being- 
free  and  having-been-created  are  two  characteristics  that  nullify 
each  other,  that  are  contradictory ;  hence  the  assertion  that 
God  has  made  creatures  and  given  to  them  at  che  same  time 
freedom  of  will,  really  says  that  God  has  made  them  and  at 
the  same  time  not  made  them.  ...  A  created  being  is  as  it 
has  been  created.  ,  .  .  Consequently  the  guilt  of  the  world 
(just  like  the  evil  of  the  world,  which  it  is  as  hard  to 
deny)  always  falls  back  on  its  creator."  ^  Nor,  again,  can  a 
pantheism  of  the  idea,  with  its  abolition  of  the  distinction 
between  human  and  divine  thought,  be  regarded  as  ex- 
planatory of  the  actual  process  and  development  in  the 
world,  or  of  the  actual  contradiction  in  the  will  of  man, 
which  we  have  found  to  constitute  the  crucial  part  of  the 
ethical  problem.  No  philosophy  of  religion  which  fails  to 
give  a  deep  and  serious  explanation  of  the  contradiction 
that  is  in  my  being  and  ivill  is  for  Schopenhauer  a  philo- 
sophy of  religion  at  all.  There  must  at  least  be  an  explana- 
tion of  the  radical  contradiction  that  characterises  the  life  of 
the  individual,  and  there  must  be  some  path  pointed  out  along 
which  that  contradiction  may  be  overcome. 

II.  Schopenhauer's  own  philosophy  of  religion  is  a  kind  of 
fusion  of  esoteric  Buddhism  and  esoteric  Christianity  on  the 
foundations  of  dogmatic  idealism,  with  the  objective  elements 
of  professed  history  and  dogma  left  out  of  Christianity.  "At 
the  same  time  it  [my  philosophy]  is  candid  in  confessing  that  a 
man  must  turn  his  back  upon  the  world,  and  that  the  denial  of 
the  will  to  live  is  the  way  of  redemption.  It  is  therefore  really 
at  one  with  the  spirit  of  the  New  Testament,  whilst  all  other 
systems  are  couched  in  the  spirit  of  the  Old ;  that  is  to  say, 
theoretically  as  well  as  practically,  their  result  is  Judaism — 

^  Werke,  Parerga.    ■ 


392  Schopenhauer's  system. 

mere  despotic  theism.  In  this  sense,  then,  my  doctrine  mi<;ht 
be  called  the  only  true  Christian  philo  ^ihy,  however  paradoxi- 
cal a  statement  this  may  seem  to  people  who  take  superficial 
views  instead  of  penetrating  to  the  heart  of  the  matter."  ^  It' 
we  can  hold  together  nm^h  that  wo  have  already  reached,  or 
indicated  as  reached  by  Schopenhauer,  in  regard  to  the  bond- 
age of  the  intellect  and  the  will  of  man  and  his  would-be 
struggle  after  a  higher  life,  and  incorporate  it  with  Christian 
teaching  about  innate  or  original  sin,  and  Buddhistic  teaching,' 
about  the  "  perfect  enlightenment "  of  the  man  who  sees  that 
the  whole  world  is  show  and  semblance,  all  evil  so  far  as  it  is 
bound  up  with  the  evil  will  of  the  individual,  and  who  seeks 
for  nothing  beyond  this  very  enlightenment  itself  about  the 
illusoriness  of  all  that  depends  upon  the  merely  finite  intellect 
and  will,  we  have  the  pith  and  the  essence  of  Schopenhauer's 
belief  and  feeling  in  the  matter  of  religion. 

The  first  thing  that  we  have  to  think  of  if  we  would 
appreciate  his  position  is  the  eternal  necessity  of  all  events 
and  all  phenomena.  Every  finite  thing  to  the  wise  man 
is  determined  or  necessitated,  in  the  sense  that  it  forms 
part  of  a  chain  of  necessary  events  which  extends  infinitely 
far  both  backwards  and  forwards.  Everything  is  connected 
with  every  other  thing  in  the  world,  and  nothing  could  be 
different  from  what  it  is  or  happen  otherwise  than  it  does. 
There  is  nothing  outside  of  this  chain  of  necessary  events  and 
phenomena,  and  nothing  can  be  said  to  be  the  beginning 
or  the  end  of  it.  In  other  words,  the  world  is  cyclic  in 
its  character  and  returns  back  upon  itself,  and  there  is 
nothing  in  the  world  but  one  will  to  live,  which  is  omni- 
potent so  far  as  it  itself  is  concerned,  although  all  of  its 
finite  assertions  are  necessitated.  When  we  view  things  with 
the  intellect  we  see  that  all  things  are  determined  in  a 
necessary  sequence.     There  is  no  proof  possible  of  the  free- 

^  B.  S.,  Studies  in  PessimiBm,  p.  27. 


SCHOPENHAUKU's    I'HILOSOPHY    OF    KELIGION.        393 

(lom  or  the  spontaneity  of  any  one  beinju;  or  of  any  one 
person  in  the  universe.  To  Schopenhauer  indeed  there  never 
could  be  such  a  proof,  for  it  is  of  the  essence  of  the  intellect 
to  view  nil  thin<,'S  as  necessarily  determined,  as  having  causes 
which  inevitably,  make  them  what  they  are.  ]Jy  the  intellect, 
of  course,  we  must  mean,  when  reading  Schopenhauer,  practi- 
cally the  understanding,  and  its  power  of  detecting  the  causal 
order  that  is  in  things.  This  power  of  tracing  the  connections 
among  things  is  the  only  value  that  our  intellect  has  for  us 
according  to  Schopenhauer.  He  believes  in  no  such  transcen- 
dental or  mystical  faculty  as  would  enable  us  to  rise  beyond 
tlie  necessity  of  the  world  as  we  know  it. 

The  only  transcendental  thing  in  the  world  is  will,  and  this 
wc  know  directly  in  ourselves.  The  manifestations  of  will  we 
perceive  with  our  senses  and  with  our  understanding ;  but  we 
see  these  manifestations  only  indirectly,  because,  when  we  use 
our  senses  or  our  understanding,  we  always  see  plienomena 
separated  from  and  only  externally  connected  with  one  an- 
other, and  not  continuous  with  one  another  as  they  really  are 
in  the  will.  All  things  on  the  inside  are  will  to  Schopen- 
hauer. We  are  on  the  inside  of  things  because  we  are  will, 
and  we  know  everything  to  be  part  of  the  one  evolution  of  life 
or  will.  There  is  no  explanation  of  will ;  it  itself  is  not  known 
by  the  mere  intellect  although  its  different  assertions  may  be. 
There  is  no  difficulty  about  learning  what  will  is.  Willing 
needs  not  to  be  learned  or  understood ;  indeed  it  cannot  be — 
vclle  non  discitur.  To  know  will  you  simply  have  to  be  will. 
There  is  no  beginning  and  no  end  of  will.  You  may  reduce 
my  personality  to  the  beat  of  my  heart  or  to  the  property  that 
all  living  matter  has  of  expanding  and  contracting,  but  that 
very  power  of  expansion  and  contraction  again  is  just  willing. 
In  short,  you  must  simply  give  up  trying  to  go  beyond  will- 
ing ;  in  willing  the  world  is  at  once  an  eternal  process  and  an 
eternal  stationary  thing — a  mine  stans — at  tlie  same  time.     As 


394  Schopenhauer's  system. 

a  thing  or  being  among  other  things  and  beings  I  am  deter- 
mined and  necessitated ;  as  representing  and  in  fact  being  in 
a  sense  the  core  of  things,  the  will,  I  nm  free.  I  will  all  that 
the  world-will  does ;  I  have  willed  the  life  of  the "  world  a 
thousand  times ;  I  willed  thfit  life  even  before  my  conscious- 
ness of  myself  arose ;  I  willed  before  I  knew  what  I  was 
doing.  I  waken  up  to  find  that  I  am  implicated  in  the  guilt 
or  the  tlieoretiual  error  of  all  existence.  I  have  willed  with 
the  world-will,  and  >  ave  gone  the  way  of  all  flesh.  The  re- 
sponsibility for  all  ly  actions  falls  upon  myself.  I  have 
willed  with  the  cosmos ;  I  have  affirmed  life.  I  must  identify 
all  the  consequences  of  my  actions  with  myself.  My  natural 
character,  although  inborn  in  me,  is  yet  something  that  I  have 
myself  willed ;  I  myself  have  affirmed  it. 

"  There  is  nothing  more  certain  than  the  general  truth  that 
it  is  the  grievous  sin  of  the  world  which  has  produced  the 
grievous  suffering  of  the  world.  I  am  not  referring  hero  to 
the  physical  connection  between  those  two  things  lying  in  the 
realm  of  experience ;  my  meaning  is  metaphysical.  Accord- 
ingly, the  sole  thing  that  reconciles  me  to  the  Old  Testament 
is  the  story  of  the  Fall.  In  my  eyes  it  is  the  only  meta- 
physical truth  in  that  book,  even  though  it  appears  in  tlie 
form  of  an  allegory.  There  seems  to  me  no  better  explanation 
of  our  existence  than  that  it  is  the  result  of  some  false  step, 
some  sin  of  which  we  are  paying  the  penalty."  ^ 

I  cannot  shift  the  responsibility  of  my  being  on  to  anything 
else  or  anybody  else.  In  the  first  place,  it  is  theoretically 
absurd  to  do  so,  because  there  is  only  one  will  in  the  world, 
and  I  am  of  its  essence.  I  am  in  fact  "  it."  A  person  who 
regards  himself  as  made  by  another  is  already  irreligious  in  the 
eyes  of  Schopenhauer.  He  is  unregenerate  and  unrepentant 
in  so  far  as  he  is  unwilling  to  take  upon  himself  the  burden 
of  all  the  misery  and  sin  in  the  world.  This  explains  the 
1  B.  S.,  studies,  &c.  (Suflferings  of  the  World),  p.  24. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     395 

venom  of  his  liatred  against  all  merely  (ixtemal  and  intellectual 
philosophies  of  religion.  They  are  all,  in  his  eyes,  cosmologieal 
instead  of,  as  they  should  be,  anthropological,  speaking  about 
an  external  world  rather  than  about  man  and  his  will.  They 
do  not  deal  with  the  problem  of  the  misery  of  the  will.  The 
first  step  across  the  threshold  of  religion  to  Schopenhauer 
consists  in  the  acknowledgment  of  what  the  Bible  calls  the 
evil  that  is  in  our  nature,  and  what  he  calls  the  inutility 
of  individual  and  personal  volition.  "  If  that  veil  of  Maya, 
the  principium  individuationis,  is  lifted  from  the  eyes  of  a 
man  to  such  an  extent  that  he  no  longer  makes  the  ego- 
tistical distinction  between  his  person  and  that  of  others, 
but  takes  as  much  interest  in  the  sufferings  of  other  indi- 
viduals as  in  his  own,  and  therefore  is  not  only  benevolent 
in  the  highest  degree,  but  ever  ready  to  sacrifice  his  own 
individuality  whenever  such  a  sacrifice  will  save  a  number  of 
ullicr  persons,  then  it  clearly  follows  that  such  a  man,  who 
recognises  in  all  beings  his  own  inmost  and  true  self,  must 
also  regard  the  infinite  suffering  of  all  suffering  as  his  own, 
and  take  on  himself  the  pain  of  the  whole  world.  No  suffer- 
ing is  any  longer  strange  to  him.  All  the  miseries  of  otl  ers 
.  .  .  work  upon  his  mind  like  his  own.  .  .  .  Since  he  sees 
through  the  principium  individuationis,  all  lies  equally  near 
him.  He  knows  the  ivhole,  comprehends  its  nature,  and  firids 
that  it  consists  in  a  constant  passing  aivay,  vain  striving,  inward 
conflict,  and  continual  suffering."  ^ 

There  is  a  breadth  of  intuitive  perception  in  all  this,  a 
fundamental  recognition  of  the  essential  characteristics  of 
liuman  nature — as  there  is,  for  that  matter,  in  nearly  every- 
thing that  Schopenhauer  writes  ^ — which  commends  it  to  us  as 
containing  probably  a  large  element  of  truth.  It  is  the  evil 
self  that  we  want  explained,  and  the  contradiction  that  exists 

1  Werke,  ii.  447  ;  Die  Welt  als  Wille.     H.  and  K.,  i.  489. 
a  Cf.  p.  201. 


396  SCHOPENHAUER  S   SYSTEM. 

in  the  will  of  the  individual.  It  must  be  confessed,  with 
Schopenhauer,  that  we  never  can  fully  explain  our  actions  so 
long  as  we  insist  that  we  are  different  from  other  people  and 
from  our  ancestors  and  from  those  who  are  round  about  us, 
and  from  the  world  generally  or  the  life  that  is  in  the  world. 
The  moment  that  we  regard  ourselves  as  individual  beings, 
separate  from  others  and  entitled  to  wishes  of  our  own,  we 
find  that  we  practically  put  ourselves  in  the  position  of  a 
billiard-ball  which  is  to  be  moved  by  others,  and  must  be 
moved  and  will  be  moved  in  any  way  that  a  given  combin- 
ation of  conditions  may  render  inevitable.  We  must  say, 
whether  we  like  it  or  not,  that  we  are  part  of  the  will  to 
live;  that  we  are  its  assertion,  and  that  our  life  has  to  be 
explained  by  the  thousand  and  one  unconscious  tendencies 
(and  of  course  also  by  the  few  conscious  tendencies)  of  the 
will  to  live.  We  must  do  this  if  we  would  understand  the 
world  even  as  an  intellectual  phenomenon.  We  cannot,  in- 
deed, understand  the  world  if  we  do  not  take  the  point  of  view 
of  the  will  in  looking  at  it. 

As  soon,  then,  as  a  man  has  grasped  the  notion  of  volition 
as  the  key-note  of  the  self,  he  ceases  to  explain  himself  by 
things  outside  of  himself.  He  has  also  at  the  same  time 
done  with  external  explanations  of  the  world,  and  he  is  pre- 
pared to  find  the  reality  of  the  world  in  the  one  will  that  is 
manifesting  itself  in  himself  and  in  all  things.  I  must  take 
to  myself  all  the  guilt  of  my  finite  existence,  and  admit  that 
I  too  have  willed  to  live,  have  willed  the  world.  Only  in  my 
volition,  or  in  the  fact  of  my  volition,  and  in  all  that  is 
implied  in  that,  do  I  gain  an  understanding  of  the  world. 
From  the  standpoint  of  religion  I  must  confess  that  I  have 
made  myself  a  slave  of  the  will  to  live,  and  I  must  be  willin.s 
to  take  to  myself  the  consequences  of  my  wayward  and  sinful 
volition.  A  man  must  admit  the  extent  to  which  he  is 
necessitated   and  not  free,  before  he  is  on  the  road  to  real 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      397 

peace  of  mind,  which  is  real  freedom.  This  is  getting  into 
mystery  of  course,  but  it  is  getting  to  the  roots  of  human  per- 
sonality, which  are  slu'ouded  in  mystery.^  I  can  see  myself 
at  once  as  a  natural  creation,  a  wayward  finite  thing,  and  yet 
as  a  being  who  recognises  himself  to  be  one  with  all  existence, 
who  is  potentially  everytliing  that  the  will  is  trying  to  be — 
that  is,  who  is  potentially  free.  It  is  literally  true  that  liberty 
is  a  mystery.  As  finite  will  I  am  enslaved,  but  as  infinite  will 
I  am  free.  The  finite  will  must  be  made  to  die  unto  itself,  and 
to  affirm  the  eternal  Ideas  of  the  eternal  Will.  Whatever 
else  religion  is,  it  is  first  and  foremost  a  perception  of  the 
radical  evil  that  is  in  the  finite  will.  When  a  man  sees  that 
and  becomes  conscious  of  that,  becomes  conscious  of  the  fact 
that  he  has  willed  the  natural  life  before  he  had  even  a  con- 
sciousness of  the  spiritual  life,  he  is  on  the  road  to  salvation 
— Schopenhauer  would  say  he  is  potentially  saved. 

It  is  not  exactly  incumbent  upon  Schopenhauer  to  say  how 
the  perception  of  the  guilt  of  the  merely  natural  will  in  man 
may  be  brought  about.  The  evil  of  the  purely  selfish  or  of 
^jurely  natural  will  is  so  apparent  to  him,  that  he  says  life  is 
nothing  but  one  continuous  crucifixion.  Out  of  the  merely 
finite  will  can  never  come  anything  but  self-assertion  and 
waywardness  and  unhappiness.  If  man  could  really  affirm 
the  Ideas — enter,  that  is,  upon  the  heritage  of  beauty  and 
moral  perfection — he  would  of  course  be  able  to  crucify  the 
finite  will  to  some  effect.  We  have  already  seen  tiiat  man 
can  do  this  according  to  Schopenhauer  only  by  an  absolute 
surrender  of  all  particular  interests,  all  particular  life,  all 
separate  personality.  It  is  for  the  individual  as  individual 
that  the  world  is  nugatory  and  illusory.  And  Schopen- 
hauer really  stops  here.  It  is  literally  true,  however,  as  he 
maintains,  that  neither  pure  goodness,  nor  freedom,  nor  re- 
.^ponsibility,  are  explicable  apart  from  the  religious  intuition 

'  Again  see  chap.  iii.  p.  139. 


398  Schopenhauer's  system. 

lying  at  the  foundation  of  Christian  teaching  about  original 
sin  and  Buddhist  teaching  about  finitt  desire  and  ^nite 
volition.  The  finite  self  must  be  seen  to  be  actually  im- 
plicated in  the  guilt  of  all  existence,  and  must  be  virtually 
crucified,  before  a  complete  answer  to  the  question  of  per- 
sonal freedom,  and  therefore  of  conscious  personality,  can 
be  either  given  or  understood.  The  problem  of  freedom,  in 
other  words,  cannot  be  solved  at  a  lower  level  thiin  that  of 
the  philosophy  of  religion.^  Nor  can  the  world,  the  so-called 
objective  world,  and  the  relation  of  that  world  to  the  human 
personality,  become  intelligible  until  we  put  ourselves  at  the 
point  of  view  of  the  will.  We  are  now  almost  for  the  first 
time  in  a  position  to  see  the  significance  of  Schopenhauer's 
cosmic  philosophy  in  its  ultimate  form. 

With  the  negation  of  the  wayward  self  and  the  wayward 
will  in  the  religious  intuition  and  in  religious  repentance  and 
resignation,  the  whole  world  assumes  a  different  aspect.  We 
may  think  of  a  poem  of  Goethe's  in  which  this  idea  is  ex- 
pressed. A  man  is  there  supposed  to  have  placed  happiness 
successively  in  money  and  possessions,  in  pleasure,  in  travel, 
in  reputation  and  honours,  in  war  and  glory.  None  of  these 
things  seem  to  bring  what  they  promised,  and  at  last  the  man 
gives  up  all  pretensions  and  claims  to  individual  happiness. 
He  then  finds  that  the  whole  world  belongs  to  him. 

"  Nun  hab'  ich  mein'  Sach'  auf  Nichts  gestellt 
Unci  mein  gehort  die  ganze  Welt."  ^ 

The  New  Testament  parable  of  the  rich  young  man  sets  forth 
the  same  negative  teaching  with  more  that  is  positive  behind  it. 
Many  of  the  Buddhistic  parables  and  much  Buddhistic  teaching 
speak  in  a  similar  strain.  Schopenhauer  can  only  say  that 
with  the  negation  of  the  finite  self,  the  world  is  negated  and 
the  illusions  of  life  at  an  end.     The  finite  intellect  is  but  a 

1  Of.  p.  177. 

'^  Cf.  the  refrain  of  the  '  Imitatio ' :  "  Dimitte  omnia  et  invenies  omnia." 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      399 

tool  of  the  finite  will ;  it  exists  and  has  existed  only  to  help 
the  will  in  the  pursuit  of  its  ends.  In  the  intellect,  as  Scho- 
penhauer says,  the  will  struck  a  light  for  itself  to  help  itself 
along  its  path.  And  in  truth  philosophy  has  often  made  itself 
absurd  in  trying  to  explain  the  world  from  the  point  of  view  of 
the  intellect  without  reference  to  the  will,  whose  mere  servant 
intellect  is.  The  world  is  intelligible  only  from  a  teleological 
point  of  view,  as  an  evolution  of  will  from  lower  to  higher 
grades  of  potency;  and  we  must  take  a  firm  hold  of  the 
element  of  fact  that  is  contained  in  this  thought.  To  Schop- 
enhauer the  world  is  throughout  illusory,  for  the  reason  that 
human  beings  will  apparently  never  cease  to  will  as  separate 
existences,  because  they  will  continue  to  act  as  if  their  own 
finite  satisfaction  were  the  only  thing  for  which  the  world 
existed.  "  The  whole  foundation  on  which  our  existence 
rests  is  the  present  —  the  ever  fleeting  present.  It  lies, 
then,  in  the  very  nature  of  our  existence  to  take  the  form 
of  constant  motion,  and  to  offer  no  possibility  of  our  ever 
attaining  the  rest  for  which  we  are  always  striving.  "We 
are  like  a  man  running  down  hill,  who  cannot  keep  on  his 
legs  unless  he  runs  on,  and  will  inevitably  fall  if  he  stops ;  or 
again,  like  a  pole  balanced  on  the  tip  of  one's  finger ;  or  like  a 
planet  which  would  fall  into  its  sun  the  moment  it  ceased  to 
hurry  forward  on  its  way.  Unrest  is  the  mark  of  existence."  ^ 
Art  and  disinterested  moral  conduct  make  men  feel  how  illus- 
ory separate  existence  and  separate  volition  really  are,  but  reli- 
gion alone  can  make  a  man  sincerely  repent  of  the  assertion 
of  his  finite  will  and  completely  disbelieve  in  it.  There  is 
just  as  much  suffering  and  disappointment  in  the  world  as 
there  is  of  separate  or  selfish  volition. 

Death  is  the  punishment  meted  out  by  the  retributive  justice 
of  nature  to  human  beings  for  their  error  in  willing  to  live  as 
individual  existences.     "  Every  individual  existence  is  f  unda- 
*  B.  Saunders,  Studies,  &c.,  pp.  34,  35. 


400  Schopenhauer's  system. 

mentally  an  error,  a  mistake,  something  that  had  better  not 
have  been,  something  that  it  is  the  special  purpose  of  life  to 
bring  us  back  from."  "  Death  is  the  great  reprimand  which  the 
will  to  live,  or  more  especially  the  egoism  which  is  essential  to 
this,  receives  through  the  course  of  nature  ;  and  it  may  be  con- 
ceived as  a  punishment  for  our  existence."  "  Death  says, '  Thou 
art  the  product  of  an  act  which  should  not  have  been ;  therefore 
to  expiate  it  thou  must  die.' "  Schopenhauer  is  like  St  Paul 
in  always  looking  upon  death  as  a  punishment  for  a  sin  that 
is  original  or  implicated  somehow  in  the  very  fact  of  life 
itself.  One  rather  objects  to  his  use  of  this  conception  with- 
out a  more  definite  acknowledgment  of  its  possible  source. 
But  then,  once  more,  this  is  not  the  way  in  which  Schopen- 
hauer proceeds.  He  would  simply  have  said  that  he  in- 
tuitively felt  that  death  was  the  penalty  for  the  error  of 
willing  to  exist  for  self.  The  faces  of  all  old  people,  he  often 
remarks,  show  that  "  disappointment "  which  is  the  outcome  of 
all  individual  life ;  and  the  faces  of  the  dead  that  resignation 
to  the  world-will  which  is  a  tacit  acceptance  of  the  punish- 
ment that  is  due  to  them.  The  individual  who  wills  to  exist 
for  himself  is  inevitably  disappointed,  according  to  Schopen- 
hauer, and  inevitably  shows  it.  Death  is  something  that  is 
necessarily  bound  up  with  the  life  of  the  individual. 

It  is  quite  possible  to  hail  Schopenhauer  as  one  of  the  most 
pronounced  upholders  of  altruism  that  ever  existed.  He  may, 
in  fact,  be  said  to  teach  emphatically  that  if  life  is  measured 
in  terms  of  our  own  mere  individual  existence,  our  own  mere 
individual  happiness,  then  beyond  question  it  is  and  must  be 
illusory.  But  he  teaches  far  more  than  that,  or  at  least  his 
instructiveness  does  not  end  merely  there.  For  philosophical 
purposes  it  is  just  as  interesting  to  study  how  he  fails  to  lay 
hold  of  the  real  universal,  the  real  altruistic  element  in  things, 
the  thing  that  makes  the  individual  rise  above  the  limits  of 
his  own  mere  finite  personality. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      401 

Schopenhauer  thinks  of  the  world  or  of  life  as  somethincr 
that  is  being  at  once  eternally  affirmed  and  eternally  denied 
in  the  case  of  the   individual  will  that  is  conscious  of   the 
error  and  the  guilt  of  finitude— the  will  that  affirms  at  once 
a  purely  natural  and  a  purely  ideal  existence.     The  "  to  be  " 
and  the  "  not  to  be "  is  the  great   question  every  individual 
being  must  put  to  himself.      It  is  nothing  after  all  to  be  and 
to  will  as  a  separate  finite  individual.     "  The  substance  of  the 
world -famed   Monologue  in  'Hamlet/  taken  as   a  whole,  is 
simply  this :  our  condition  is  so  pitiable  that  complete  non- 
existence  would  be   decidedly  preferable   to  it."  i'    Schopen- 
hauer goes  on,  however,  in  the  same  place  to  say  that  these 
alternatives    are   never   really  presented   to    men,   because   we 
have   the   feeling  that  death   does   not  end   things — that   it 
is  no  absolute   destruction.      Ontologically  and  teleologically 
reality,  according  to  him,  may  be  reduced  to  the  self  that  is 
trying  to  be  real,  through  an  affirmation  at  once  of  its  own 
natural  life  and  also  of  the  life  of  the  Ideas.     If  he  had  shown 
—which  he  has  not — how  the  self  could  attain  to  a  real  as 
opposed  to  an  illusory  existence,  there  would  be   evident  a 
whole  world  of  meaning  in  his  positive  principle  of  will.     But 
the  affirmation  and  negation  of  the  world  hangs  on  such  a 
slender  thread  in  Schopenhauer  (on  the   human  intellect  or 
brain,  in  fact),  that  we  cannot,  dogmatically,  stand  just  where 
he  stands  himself.     The  Christian  and  the  Buddhistic  elements 
m  Schopenhauer's  religious  thought  are  more  true  and  more 
real  and  more  valuable  than  the  mere  idealism,  the  subjective 
idealism   with  which  his   philosophy  began,  and  which   still 
persists,  to  a  certain  extent,  in  his  religious  ideas.     His  whole 
edifice  totters  if  we  deny,  as  we  saw  good  reason  for  doing,"  the 
idealistic  presuppositions  on  which  it  rests — the  idea  that  the 
world  depends  for  its  existence  on  the  mere  self  or  the  mere 
intellect. 

1  Schop.,  Werke,  ii.  382,  383.  a  cf  ^jj^p^  jj^ 

2  c 


402  Schopenhauer's  system. 

The  interesting  thing  in  regard  to  this  very  point  is,  tliat 
our  best  grounds  for  denying  Schopenhauer's   idealistic  pre- 
suppositions lie  just  in  his  own  idea — his  greatest  idea — of 
willing,  and  of  the  contradiction  in  the  will.     I  cannot  negate 
the  world  so  simply  and   so   easily  as   Schopenhauer  would 
have  me  in  theory  to  do,  for  the  mere  reason  that  I  am  will, 
embodied  will,  and  that  as  such  I  am  myself  a  part  and  not 
the  whole  of  existence.     I  may  "  negate  "  the  merely  natural 
basis  of  my  life  as  such,  in  order  to  "  affirm  "  the  spiritual 
purpose  that  is  suggested  in  the  life  and  history  of  humanity ; 
but  I  cannot  "  negate  "  the  life  of  the  whole  world.     I  cannot 
be  said  to  be  even  the  supporter — much  less  the  destroyer 
— of  a  world  out  of  which  my  natural  self  comes,  and  which 
I  recognise  as  infinitely  greater  than  1  am  myself.     The  in- 
tellect is  only  an  accompaniment  of  my  life ;   it  may  enable 
me  to  think  of  the  world  as  my  idea,  but  that  thought  has 
only  a  practical  value,  the  value  of  enabling  me  to  determine 
my  relation  to  the  world  of  which  I  form  a  part.      It  is  at 
least  a  healthy  way  of  looking  at  things  to  regard  the  intellect 
as  a  secondary  element  in  man's  life.     The  intellect  is  the  dis- 
tinctive thing  about  man,  it  is  true,  but  yet  it  is  not  the  thing 
about  his  life  that  makes  him  real.     That  which  makes  him 
real  is  will.     This  the  idealists  have   always   forgotten,  and 
Schopenhauer  himself  forgot  it  in  allowing  himself  to  think 
of  the  world  as  simply  the  idea  of  the  conscious  subject.    The 
man  who  is  deliberating  about  being  and  non-being,  about  the 
"  to  be  "  and  the  "  not  to  be,"  is,  after  all,  debating  only  ahont 
the  reasonableness  or  the  unreasonableness  of  the  little  world 
that  he  is  working  out  for  himself.     He  is  at  the  porch  of 
repentance  and  resignation,  which  is  the  approach  to  the  gate 
of  life,  but  he  is  only  there. 

Schopenhauer's  answer,  then,  to  what  he  affirms  to  be  the 
two  cardinal  problems  of  all  religion,  the  transcendental  sig- 
nificance of  our  actions  and  our  existence  after  death,  is  fairly 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  eeligion.      403 

apparent.  It  is  that  our  action  points  us  to  and  connects  us 
with  all  existence  a  parte  ante  and  a  parte  post ;  the  roots 
of  our  action  carry  us  back  througli  preceding  generations  into 
the  infinite  life  of  the  world,  and  we  have  in  our  eflbrts  and 
impulses  and  instincts  willed  the  life  of  all  finite  existence. 
Yet  everything  in  experience  tends  to  show  that  our  personality, 
in  subjecting  itself  to  external  nature,  has  received  into  itself 
something  that  is  foreign  to  it ;  hence  the  non-attainment  and 
the  non-finality  that  are  the  characteristics  of  all  finite  life. 
It  is  only  by  a  sort  of  new  and  spiritual  birth  that  we  can 
enter  upon  the  ideal  life,  the  life  of  the  Ideas ;  by  an  essential 
negation  of  the  merely  natural  life,  of  the  idea  of  the  satis- 
faction of  the  finite,  and  an  admission  of  the  fact  that  we 
ourselves  are  somehow  responsible  for  the  whole  error  and 
guilt  of  the  finite.  There  is  endless  life  in  the  affirmation 
of  the  Ideas  of  perfect  beauty  and  perfect  goodness.  The 
perfect  life  is  associated  with  the  perfection  of  the  purpose 
that  is  expressed  in  things,  and  most  perfectly  expressed  in 
the  ideals  of  beauty  and  goodness  which  we  are  somehow 
made  aware  of  in  the  great  creations  of  the  greatest  minds. 

It  may  of  course  again  be  said  that  the  philosophy  of  the 
idea,  the  philosophy  of  Spinoza  and  of  Hegel  (and  of  Aristotle 
too,  for  that  part  of  (it),  has  always  contended  that  man's  true 
life  consists  in  spiritual  purpose  and  not  in  the  life  of  sense 
and  impulse.  But,  then,  by  spiritual  purpose  we  can  mean 
only  the  highest  possible  development  of  life  itself;  and  so 
it  is  still  true  that  life  consists  in  efort  (or  will)  and  attain- 
ment— attainment,  indeed,  that  can  contemplate  itself,  self- 
conscious  attainment,  but  still  attainment  and  volition.  To  say 
that  man's  life  consists  in  the  contemplation  of  the  Ideas,  in 
his  mere  power  of  returning  back  upon  himself  in  his  thoughts 
and  conceptions,  is  to  lay  one's  self  open  to  the  logical  dangers 
of  a  pantheism  of  the  idea.  It  cannot  be  said  that  Schopen- 
hauer himself  is  free  from  this  tendency,  as  has  been  indicated 


404  Schopenhauer's  system. 

in  tlie  discussion  of  his  main  ideas  upon  artistic  insight  and 
beauty.      Indeed  Scliopenhauer's  philosophy  is  an  illusionism 
resulting  from   a  more   or  less   uncritical  acceptance  on  his 
part  of  two  abstract  views  about  man's  life :  the  idea  of  man 
as  a  being  who  tliinks  the  universe ;  and  the  idea  of  man  as  a 
being  in  whom  the  will  asserts  itself  most  strongly.     If  we 
rest  on  the  letter  of  Schopenhauer's  system,  we  must  say  that 
although  the  first  thing  he  saw  about  man  was  his  volition  and 
his  activity,  he  yet  could  not  give  a  completely  rational  account 
of  volition,  could  not  show  how  man  in  his  volition  really 
accomplished  anything,  and  that  he  consequently  fell  back  on 
Platonism  or  a  pantheism  of  the  idea.     But  there  remains  this 
difference  between  Schopenhauer  and  other  philosophers,  that 
philosophers  whose  thought  was  concerned  with  the  idea  from 
the  very  beginning  were  enabled  to  infuse  some  rational  mean- 
ing into  the  idea ;  while  he  could  not  do  this,  owing  to  the 
very  fact  that  he  had  recourse  to  the  philosophy  of  the  idea 
only  after  having  despaired  of  everything  else,  and  in  particu- 
lar of  a  rational  account  of  the  volitional  activity  of  man  (in 
which,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  was  supremely  interested). 

Seeing  that  Schopenhauer,  however,  made  will  his  first 
principle,  we  are  bound  to  interpret  the  idea  in  the  light  of 
the  will,  and  to  make  out  a  life  of  endless  attainment  to  be 
the  real  life  of  man — an  attainment  which  is  to  be  more  and 
more  conscious,  but  which  is  already  partly  achieved  by 
nature  in  her  construction  of  the  organised  life  that  she  has 
given  to  man.  The  duty  of  man  is  simply  to  infuse  a 
spiritual  meaning  into  the  purpose  that  nature  already  seems 
to  have  written  in  his  life.  "  Will,  then,  is  that  which  we 
possess  in  common  with  all  men,  nay,  with  all  animals,  and 
even  with  lower  forms  of  existence ;  and  in  so  far  we  are 
akin  to  everything — so  far,  that  is,  as  everything  is  filled 
to  overflowing  with  will.  On  the  other  hand,  that  which 
places  one  being  over  another,  and  sets   differences  between 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      405 

man  and  man,  is  intellect  and  knowledge ;  therefore  in  every 
manifestation  of  self  we  should,  as  far  as  possible,  give  play 
to  the  intellect  alone ;  for,  as  we  have  seen,  the  will  is  the 
common  part  of  us.  Every  violent  exhibition  of  will  is  common 
and  vulgar ;  in  other  words,  it  reduces  us  to  the  level  of  the 
species,  and  makes  us  a  mere  type  and  example  of  it,  in  that 
it  is  just  the  character  of  the  species  that  we  are  showing. 
So  every  fit  of  anger  is  something  common — every  unrestrained 
display  of  joy,  or  of  hate,  or  of  fear — in  short,  every  form  of 
emotion ;  in  other  words,  every  movement  of  the  will,  if  it  is 
so  strong  as  decidedly  to  outweigh  the  intellectual  element  in 
consciousness,  and  to  make  the  man  appear  as  a  being  that 
vnlh  rather  than  hiows."  ^ 

The  great  difficulty  that  exists  in  Schopenhauer  is  just  the 
difficulty  that  he  himself  has  in  thinldng  his  own  principle  of 
will.  He  really  does  not  like  action  and  volition ;  it  distracts 
his  mind  to  think  of  them.  If  the  life  of  man  consisted  only 
in  thought,  it  would  be  very  easy  for  man  to  negate  the  natural 
basis  of  his  life.  Philosophy  and  art  would  enable  him  to  do 
this.  But  it  is  not  so  much  spiritual  or  ideal  thought  that 
man  has  to  attain  to  as  spiritual  or  ideal  volition ;  and  the 
difficulty  that  lies  in  the  way  of  his  realising  this  is  that  his 
will  is  already  largely  or  almost  completely  determined  by  the 
necessities  of  his  natural  life.  Only  the  strongest  possible 
motive  can  enable  him  to  affirm  the  ideal  life  as  matter  of 
actual  volition  on  his  part.  Eeligion,  in  fact,  represents  the 
only  force  that  is  adequate  to  giving  man  this  motive.  The 
real  thing  that  religion  tries  to  do  and  ought  to  try  to  do, 
according  to  SchopenhnAier,  is  to  eradicate  out  of  man  his 
wayward  and  evil  will.  On  a  general  view  of  the  matter, 
it  may  do  this  in  any  way  it  pleases ;  indeed  different 
religions  do  it  in  different  ways.  But  this  at  least  all  those 
religions  which  are  really  schemes  of  moral  salvation  propose 

^  Werke,  vi.  634  ;  B.  S.,  Studies  in  Pessimism,  p.  67. 


406  Schopenhauer's  system. 

to  attempt.  Schopenhauer  practically  holds  that  a  religion 
may  teach  us  anything  it  likes  about  the  gods,  provided  it 
show  us  how  the  gods  can  help  us.  The  only  way  m  which 
he  thought  the  wayward  or  selfish  or  natural  or  evil  will 
could  be  overcome,  was  to  have  it  utterly  eradicated  or  com- 
pletely negated.  He  cannot  tell  us  how  the  will  may  "  find " 
itself  again  after  having  denied  or  "  lost "  itself.  Doubt- 
less this  very  difficulty  indicates  the  limits  of  philosophy. 
Philosophy  can  never  give  to  man  any  conclusive  answer 
about  the  survival  of  his  personality  after  the  destruction  in 
him  of  the  merely  finite  will  to  live.  It  can  only  put  the 
thought  of  man  on  the  path  along  which  it  may  see  how  such 
survival  is  not  only  possible  hut  natural  and  rational.  Man,  as 
Kant  put  it,  must  always  do  his  part  in  the  matter  of  his 
salvation,  believing  that  God  will  do  the  rest.  Schopenhauer 
was  so  strongly  convinced  of  the  error  of  finite  existence  as 
such,  or  at  least  of  the  illusory  or  partial  character  of  finite 
existence,  that  he  refused  to  give  any  encouragement  to  the 
idea  of  a  personal  immortality.  The  individual  who  is  in  any 
way  concerned  about  the  survival  of  his  merely  personal  life  is 
not  yet,  in  his  eyes,  sufficiently  impenetrated  with  the  know- 
ledge of  the  evil  of  the  finite  will  as  such ;  he  is,  in  fact,  neither 
philosophical  nor  truly  religious. 

And  yet  on  Schopenhauer's  own  principles  we  are  bound  to 
seek  for  a  development  of  the  life  of  man  along  the  path  of 
will  and  volition.  Man's  being  consists  in  will,  and  it  is  ia 
the  very  idea  of  his  being  that  he  ought  to  attain  to  the 
reality  of  which  he  seems  potentially  capable,  the  reality  of  a 
completely  rational  life.  Kant  saw  that  a  thoroughly  good 
will  is  the  only  absolutely  good  thing  in  the  world,  and  yet 
that  it  exists  nowhere.  The  realisation,  as  it  were,  of  the 
ideal  in  thought  and  in  consciousness  is  not  its  realisation  in 
practice  and  in  reality.  The  philosophy  of  the  will  takes 
its   stand  upon   this   fact.       So  long  as  man   is   will,  he  is 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     407 

striving  to  bring  about  something  that  never  is  but  only  ever 
is  to  be.  The  key-note  of  will  is  conflict  and  defect,  and  the 
sense  of  defect  is  the  motive  to  volition.  The  effort  of  man's 
life  is  to  make  his  higher  purpose  as  instinctive  and  organic 
and  real  in  himself  as  are  his  lower  instincts  and  natural 
impulses.  We  have  already  suggested  that  Schopenhauer 
ihids  it  very  difficult  to  relate  together  instinct  and  conscious 
purpose.  Natural  instinct  is  natural  purpose  that  has  become 
organic,  and  the  highest  reality  of  man's  life  would  seem  to  be 
a  state  of  things  in  which  spiritual  purpose  had  also  become 
organic,  and  so  in  a  sense  natural.  The  problem  of  man's  life 
is  to  allow  the  good  and  the  ideal  to  interpenetrate  his  life, 
even  his  natural  and  impulsive  life,  and  not  merely  to  negate 
it.  We  may,  in  short,  save  ourselves  from  the  illusionism  in 
wliich  Schopenhauer  himself  ends,  by  insisting  more  strongly 
upon  his  own  principle  of  will  than  he  himself  was  able  to  do. 
The  problem  of  religion  is  to  make  the  will  good.  It  can 
best  do  this  by  awakening  in  man  some  powerful  intuitive 
perception  of  the  evil  of  his  own  nature.  Schopenhauer  can- 
not define  such  a  perception  other  than  negatively — as  con- 
sisting in  the  recognition  on  the  part  of  man  of  the  futility 
of  his  merely  natural  life.  Man  must  recognise  once  and 
for  all  that  only  by  a  sort  of  spiritual  birth,  and  not  by 
any  amount  of  natural  effort  and  struggle,  can  he  obtain 
the  heritage  of  ideal  character  and  ideal  purpose,  which  is 
potentially  his  in  virtue  of  his  higher  perceptions.  The 
condemnation  of  man  consists  in  the  fact  that  he  has  already 
allowed  himself  to  be  carried  away  by,  and  to  be  deter- 
mined by,  merely  natural  instinct  and  impulse.  He  has 
done  much  that  was  not  "  born  again  of  the  spirit."  Now 
all  that  he  do'^s  ought  really  to  be  "  born  of  the  spirit."  This 
is  the  problem  for  religion,  and  not  some  mere  intellectual 
theory  about  the  nature  of  the  world.  Man  must  become 
convinced  that  the  nature   of   things  lies   in  himself,  in  his 


408  Schopenhauer's  system. 

will,  and  recognise  that  it  is  only  through  the  moral  con- 
version of  his  ivill  that  he  will  be  cinabled  even  to  undcrstarul 
the  universe.  All  this,  doubtless,  is  as  old  as  esoteric  Chris- 
tianity or  esoteric  Buddhism,  but  the  human  mind  had  lost 
sight  of  this  at  the  end  of  the  eighteenth  century,  with  its 
rampant  individualium  and  superficial  deism  and  rationalism 
and  "  state-of-nature  "  philosophy. 

III.  Without  going  too  deeply  into  religious  polemic,  wo 
may  notice  two  or  three  other  details  of  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  of  religion,  which  further  define  the  main  drift 
of  his  teaching.  He  maintains  that  religion,  in  the  first 
instance,  prcsujrposcs  pessimism.  No  one  who  is  not  pessim- 
istic can  be  religious.  No  philosophy  which  finds  the  world 
to  be  perfectly  satisfactory  can  have  any  place  for  raligiou. 
The  philosophy  that  leaves  the  world  just  where  it  finds  it, 
is  to  Schopenhauer  a  "  wicked  estimate  "  of  things.  It  may 
invoke  any  god  or  any  number  of  gods,  to  whom  to  credit 
the  general  tendency  of  things,  but  it  is  still  dishonest  and 
wicked.  Once  a  man  believes  that  the  world  is  perfectly 
good  as  it  is,  there  is  no  limit  to  the  length  to  which  he 
may  go  in  theological  superficiality — the  theism  of  a  Bon 
Dicu  who  sees  everything  with  perfect  complacency  and  draws 
no  distinctions  about  the  actions  of  men,  or  of  a  supreme 
Speise-meister  who  has  prepared  a  continued  carnal  feast  for 
his  creatures,  or  of  an  Epicurean  god  enjoying  himself  in  the 
interstellar  spaces  of  the  world  far  from  all  the  cares  of  men, 
or,  again,  a  crass  materialism  or  sensualism,  or  a  listless  iii- 
differentism.  The  slightesL  philosophy  has  destroyed  all  this, 
in  the  first  place,  by  breaking  up  the  supposed  reality  of  the 
external  world  on  its  own  account,  and  secondly,  by  pointing 
out  the  non-finality  of  all  merely  human  achievement.  Scho- 
penhauer had  the  concrete  intuition  of  evil  as  strongly  as  St 
Paul  or  John  Bunyan  or  Augustine  or  Thomas  ii  Kempis  or 


i 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      409 

a  Buddhist  devotee ;  and  if  he  )ms  done  nothing  else  he  has 
perhaps  conip(!llcd  philosophy  to  recognise  the  fact  of  evil  in 
the  world,  under  whatever  name  it  may  please  to  treat  of  it. 

Then,  in  the  second  place,  religion  to  Schopenhauer  always 
presuppost'H  a  certain  amount  of  idealism.  He  is,  in  the 
main,  right  in  this  too.  He  thinks  that  no  philosophy  of 
religion  wliich  fails  to  rise  beyond  the  ordinary  realism  of 
common-sense  deserves  the  name  of  philosophy.  Now  we 
have  seen  that  we  may  agree  with  idealism  in  its  aflirmations 
if  we  cannot  agree  with  it  in  its  denials  about  reality. 
Idealism  insists  that  much  of  apparent  material  reality  implies 
the  existence  of  spirit  or  of  consciousness.  Both  Brahmanism 
and  Buddhism  seem  to  recognise  this  fact,  at  least  by  way  of 
sensuous  fancy  or  imagination  if  not  by  demonstration,  and  in 
so  far  as  they  do  so  they  are  doubtless,  as  Schopenhauer 
suggests,  superior  to  European  materialism  and  liberal  Pro- 
testantism with  its  Bon  Lieu  and  salvation  for  all.  Idealism 
is,  of  course,  wrong  if  it  seeks  to  deny  the  reality  of  the 
body  or  of  matter.  To  do  so  would  be  to  deny  the  existence 
of  the  will,  of  the  process  in  the  world,  of  which  the  idea  is 
only  the  spectator.  A  true  idealism,  we  have  seen,  ought  to 
allow  that  all  things  are  real  enough  in  their  own  appropriate 
way,  and  that  some  things,  in  so  far  as  they  serve  a  more 
permanent  function  in  the  world  than  other  things,  are  more 
real  than  other  things.  Despite  its  many  faults,  idealism 
stands  for  the  fact  that  reality  must  be  construed  not  after 
the  fashion  of  a  soulless  materialism,  but  in  relation  to  the 
spiritual  purposes  which  characterise  the  volition  of  human 
beings.  The  chief  mistake  of  idealism  is  to  have  fostered 
the  notion  that  the  reality  of  the  world  depends  in  any  way 
upon  the  existence  of  the  merely  finite  mind.  A  philosophy 
of  the  will  has  never  any  difficulty  in  showing  that  the  so- 
called  finite  mind  or  consciousness  is  simply  a  particular  form 
if  the  will  to  live,  a  mere  knowledge  that  the  will  has  in  the 


410  Schopenhauer's  system. 

brain  of  man  of  what  it  is  aiming  at,  and  not  in  any  sense  a 
primary  or  absolute  reality. 

Thirdly,  it  may  here  again  be  definitely  stated  that 
Schopenhauer  insists  very  strongly  that  the  rise  of  all  re- 
ligions is  to  be  studied  in  connection  with  the  will.  Man  has 
fled  to  the  gods — "ad  Dei  voluntatem  confugitiir  "  ^ — because  he 
has  needed  them,  and  not  merely  because  he  wanted  a  theory 
of  the  external  universe.  In  fact  the  idea-philosophy  is  (ui 
its  extreme  developments)  an  enemy  of  religion.  It  spoils 
religion,  because  it  sets  man  on  the  road  to  thinking  himself 
to  be,  in  virtue  of  his  reason,  as  good  as  God,  or  to  be  the 
only  god  in  the  universe.  Man  is  indeed  certain  to  take  tliis 
view  of  things  unless  he  is  deeply  penetrated  with  the  idea 
of  the  evil  that  exists  in  the  world,  and  the  waywardness 
that  exists  in  the  finite  human  will.  Both  the  Stoic  and  the 
Hegelian  are  very  far  from  that  spiritual  humility  which  is  the 
first  prerequisite  for  an  entrance  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven. 
It  may  be  seriously  questioned,  too,  whether  the  extent  to 
which  idealists  and  mystics  have  neglected  and  despised  the 
human  body — as  Plotinus,  for  instance,  did — has  been  much 
of  a  service  to  true  religion  or  to  humanity.  The  body, 
with  its  living  system  of  impulses  and  instincts,  stands 
for  the  fact  that  it  is  life  that  we  want  and  not  the  mere 
negation  of  the  body  or  a  mere  absorption  of  both  body  and 
mind  into  the  thought  or  the  unity  of  the  universe.  The 
will  in  which  the  life  of  man  consists  is  best  seen  in  the  body 
and  its  volitions,  and  in  the  effort  man  feels  called  upon  to 
make  to  infuse  a  spiritual  purpose  into  the  volitions  of  his 
body.  The  deepest  wish  of  men  is  to  live  on  as  better  men, 
and  not  merely  to  lapse  back  into  the  universal  reason.  But, 
to  return,  while  it  may  not  be  literally  true  that  primus  in 
orbe  fedt  deos  timor,  it  is  very  nearly  true  so  far  as  the  great 
majority  of  men  are   concerned.     We  go   to   God  when  we 

^  Cf.  Spinoza,  Ethics,  Pars  i,.  Appendix. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  r/ligion.     411 

feel  we  need  his  help  to  live.  There  may  be  a  few  highly 
gifted  individuals  who  find  God  through  a  kind  of  spiritual 
perception,  but  the  majority  of  men  never  realise  the  exist- 
ence of  the  Deity  at  all  unless  they  have  known  human  need 
and  human  suffering.  The  words  of  Goethe  in  this  regard 
are  almost  axiomatic  : — 

"  Wer  nie  sein  Brod  mit  Thriinen  ass, 
Wer  nie  die  kummervoUen  Nachte 
Auf  seinem  Bette  weinend  sass, 
Der  kennt  euch  nicht,  ihr  himmlischen  Miichte  ! " 

If  the  essence  of  man's  life  in  its  full  scope  is  will  and 
activity,  it  is  perfectly  natural  that  some  of  the  practical 
needs  of  man  should  have  been  the  earliest  influences  towards 
the  formation  and  growth  of  religious  ideas.  Eationalistic 
philosophy,  as  a  rule,  forgets  this.  It  is  too  apt,  as  it  were, 
to  hand  over  religious  experience  to  old  women  and  children, 
and  to  rely  altogether  upon  the  conception  in  the  matter 
of  religion.  As  if  the  conception  could  by  any  possibility 
contain  anything  which  had  not  come  from  a  real  experience 
of  life !  Some  of  the  unique  religious  feelings  upon  which 
Schopenhauer  dwells  at  length  in  his  writings  are,  as  was 
said,  the  transcendental  significance  of  our  action,  the  actual 
wickedness  of  man,  and  the  feeling  of  the  inutility  of  all 
strife  and  struggle  that  is  not  controlled  by  spiritual  in- 
sight, the  beauty  of  saintliness  and  goodness,  and  the  feeling 
of  what  "  the  grace  of  God  "  can  do  with  those  who  are  most 
deeply  sunk  in  the  sense  of  their  misery.  "  I  am  persuaded 
that  unless  the  natural  heart  be  broken  and  renewed  by  divine 
mercy,  however  noble  and  amiable  it  may  be  deemed  by  the 
world,  it  can  never  think  of  eternity  without  shuddering." 
These  are  the  words  of  a  murderer  which  Schopenhauer  quotes 
with  approval.^  They  represent  that  consciousness  of  the 
illusoriness  of  the  whole  world,  in  so  far  as  it  is  bound  up 
1  Werke,  iii.  227  ;  Welt  als  Wille,  H.  and  K.,  iii.  467. 


412  schopenhaukr's  system. 

witli  the  finite  will  and  intellect,  which  is  the  first  step  on  the 
road  to  salvation  according  to  him.  "  I  have  the  less  hesita- 
tion in  giving  them  here  since  Shakespeare  also  says — 

'  Out  of  these  convertites 
There  is  much  matter  to  be  heard  and  learned.'" 

Schopenhauer  always  insists  that  the  whole  force  of  belief  is 
best  seen  on  its  ethical  and  volitional  and  not  on  its  intel- 
lectual side.  This  is  in  keeping  with  the  ruling  of  psychology, 
that  in  belief  the  subjective  elements  are  more  adequately  re- 
presented than  the  objective.  If  the  objective  elements  on 
which  belief  implicitly  rests  were  directly  given  in  conscious- 
ness, then  belief  would  become  knowledge  or  certainty,  and 
would  cease  to  be  belief.  Eeligion  rests  upon  belief,  upon 
the  attitude  of  mind  towards  the  gods  that  is  most  truly  in 
accord  with  our  experience  of  life  as  a  whole.  It  is  very 
hard,  of  course,  to  see  how  we  can  be  at  all  affected  by  the  idea 
of  gods,  if  we  nave  no  grounds  for  believing  that  the  gods  are 
somehow  affected  towards  human  beings.  And  Schopenhauer 
made  no  effort  to  consider  what  the  teaching  of  history  and 
experience  is  upon  this  matter,  or  whether  they  indeed  show 
any  apparent  purpose  on  the  part  of  the  universe  (or  God)  in 
regard  to  man. 

Schopenhauer's  whole  theory  of  religion  is,  as  we  might 
suppose  from  the  beginning  of  his  philosophy,  conceived 
mainly  from  the  standpoint  of  the  individual  and  of  solip- 
sistic  idealism,  and  of  the  need  of  the  individual  to  transcend 
the  limits  of  his  life.  Brahmanism  and  Buddhism,  too,  do 
not  seem  to  get  further  than  this.  They  are,  like  Schopen- 
hauer's religious  philosophy,  largely  a  doctrine  of  "  enlighten- 
ment "  applied  as  far  as  possible  to  the  will  rather  than  (as 
is  the  way  with  rationalistic  or  idealistic  systems)  to  the 
intellect.  The  salient  thing  in  Schopenhaueifs  treatment  of 
religion  is  perhaps  his  disparagement  of  the  element  of  mere 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  seligion.     413 

knowledge  in  the  religious  consciousness,  Eeligion  rests  upon 
an  attitude  of  the  whole  man  rather  than  upon  definiie  con- 
ceptual knowledge.  We  are  really  conscious  only  of  what 
comes  over  the  threshold  of  our  consciousness,  of  that  which 
represents  the  excitation  of  the  higher  nervous  or  cerebral 
centres.  Our  real  and  deepest  relations  to  reality  are  largely 
sub-conscious ;  they  lie  out  of  our  immediate  consciousness  ]. 
we  must  believe  that  our  lives  are  somehow  completely 
related  to  the  life  oi.'  the  world,  although  strictly  speaking 
we  never  know  just  how  they  are  so  related.  The  mere 
rationalist  is  the  most  foolish  of  all  investigators  so  far  as 
the  philosophy  of  religion  goes,  when  he  fails,  as  he  very 
often  does,  to  insist  upon  the  emotional  and  the  volitional 
aspects  in  the  religious  life.  These  elements  in  the  religious 
life  are,  we  must  remember,  spiritually  or  practically  dis- 
cerned, and  the  effect  of  a  religious  doctrine  or  belief  on  the 
will  is  one  of  the  most  important  considerations  to  be  taken 
into  account  in  estimating  its  objective  value,  and  consequently 
its  reality.  Objective  value,  indeed, — and  this  is  the  outcome 
of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy, —  applies  only  to  that  which 
affects  the  will.  That  is  real  in  the  world  which  vindicates 
itself  as  a  practical  reality.  There  is  no  other  test  of  reality 
than  the  fulfilment  of  purpose  or  end,  whether  that  purpose 
or  end  is  consciously  apprehended  or  not.  Reality  is  not  so 
much  a  question  of  ontology  as  of  teleology.^  Only  that  is 
really  real  which  discharges  a  more  or  less  permanent  func- 
tion in  the  system  of  things — that  is,  which  has  a  bearing 
more  or  less  direct  on  the  evolution  of  organic  life  or  of  the 
purposes  of  human  beings.  The  ontological  argument  for  the 
existence  of  God  is  at  best  an  attempt  to  characterise  for  our 
thought  the  reality  that  is  already  present  in  our  emotional  and 
volitional  consciousness. 
Strictly  speaking,  a  philosophy  of  religion  never  proves  the 

1  Cf.  supra,  p.  163. 


414  Schopenhauer's  system. 

reality  of  a  religious  object  from  the  mere  existence  of  an  idea 
or  set  of  ideas.  The  best  way  to  set  forth  the  reality  of  re- 
ligious ideas  is  to  proceed  at  once  to  show  that  as  conceptions 
they  could  not  be  in  the  mind  unless  there  had  been  already 
some  corresponding  reality  in  practical  experience,  of  which 
they  are  simply  the  analyses  or  imperfect  subjective  apprehen- 
sion. Ontology  in  religion,  as  in  everything  else,  is  best 
understood  when  connected  with  teleology,  or  the  discharge 
of  function  or  purpose.  We  understand,  for  example,  wliat 
the  personality  of  God  or  of  the  universe  probably  means, 
chiefly  because  there  is  a  tendency  in  our  own  consciousness 
to  return  back  upon  itself  and  to  think  itself  fully.  To  be 
conscious  of  a  tendency,  if  we  have  the  faith  of  the  idealist,  is 
to  be  conscious  of  a  reality.  If  we  feel  a  certain  reality  to  be 
present  to  our  consciousness,  !:hen  we  are  sure  that  that  reahty 
exists.  God  exists  for  us  in  that  very  tendency  which  we  have 
to  determine  our  lives  and  our  thoughts  in  relation  to  a  will 
that  is  fully  conscious  of  itself  (and  not  imperfectly  conscious, 
as  we  are  of  ourselves).  It  is  on  account  of  this  fact  that  the 
"  pure  in  heart "  are  said  to  see  God,  and  the  penitent  to  find 
God  in  the  depths  of  the  consciousness  of  their  misery.  It 
must  be  repeated  that  Schopenhauer  almost  vitiates  the  whole 
force  of  his  philosophy  of  will  by  relapsing  in  the  highest 
reaches  of  his  religious  thought  back  into  subjective  idealism, 
by  speaking  as  if  the  whole  reality  of  the  world  were  depen- 
dent upon  the  idea  or  the  intellect  of  the  finite  human  person. 
He  ought,  as  it  were,  at  this  point  to  have  trusted  more — if  we 
can  think  of  him  as  capable  of  trust  or  faith — in  the  reality  of 
our  consciousness,  and  found  in  it  the  real  relation  of  our  own 
will  (which  in  itself  is  nothing)  to  a  spiritual  will  (which  is 
everything).  It  is  this  omnipotent  spiritual  will,  of  which  our 
own  rational  will  (the  will  that  affirms  the  Ideas)  is  only  the 
partial  expression,  that  is  the  ultimate  reality  of  the  universe. 
The  world,  in  other  words,  is  not  merely  an  idea  of  the  intel- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      415 

lect  or  the  object  that  corresponds  to  the  subject,  but  the  total 
manifestation  or  volition  of  the  cosmic  will. 

The  redeeming  thing  about  Schopenhauer's  condemnation  of 
rational  or  intellectual  religion  is  the  fact  that  such  condemna- 
tion rests  upon  his  belief  that  conceptual  ideas  are  an  affair 
only  of  the  intellect,  of  that  narrow  knowledge  of  reality  which 
we  have  in  our  explicit  consciousness.  If  philosophers  were 
wise  men,  they  would  seek  more  often  after  a  direct  and  veri- 
fiable sense  of  reality  (which  may  be  had  in  many  ways  from 
physical  up  to  moral  and  esthetic  sensations),  as  a  far  wider 
thing  than  the  explicit  judgment-knowledge  of  reality  which  we 
get  through  the  brain  or  understanding.  Reality  as  a  whole  is 
apprehended,  on  the  principles  of  Schopenhauer,  by  our  will, 
by  our  dynamic  and  total  consciousness,  and  not  merely  by 
our  reflective  consciousness.  And  truly  our  practical  appre- 
hension of  things  is  far  greater  in  range  and  in  potency  than 
our  merely  reflective  or  conceptual  analysis  of  reality.  There 
can  be  no  conception  of  God  or  of  anything  else  of  which 
there  has  been  no  previous  practical  apprehension  or  felt 
knowledge.  Kant,  we  remember,  pointed  out  the  limits  of  the 
ontological  argument  for  the  existence  of  God.  And,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  some  philosophers  have  always  insisted  that 
the  existence  of  God  is  something  that  is  above  all  proof,  as 
necessarily  presupposed  in  any  kind  of  proof  or  chain  of 
causes  whatsoever.  This  idea  is  at  the  bottom  of  Jacobi's  con- 
fused philosophy  of  theism,  and  also  at  the  bottom  of  Pascal's 
feelings  about  both  dogmatism  and  scepticism.^  God  is  just 
the  will  of  the  world,  as  characterised  by  its  highest  purposes, 
which  we  feel  and  see  in  our  own  human  consciousness. 
We  know  the  cosmic  will  immediately  in  our  feelings  and  in 
our  impulses,  and  we  are  enabled  through  moral  and  idealistic 

'  See,  e.g.,  Professor  Calderwood'a  '  Handbook  of  Moral  Philosophy '  (section  on 
the  Metaphysic  of  Ethics),  where  the  existence  of  God  is  claimed  to  be  above  all 
proof— given  rather  as  a  reality. 


416  Schopenhauer's  system. 

faith  to  credit  it  with  the  fulfilment  of  those  ideal  ends  and 
purposes  which  we  see  only  faintly  suggested,  partly  for  sense 
and  partly  for  imagination  in  the  real  world.  The  aged,  if 
humble  and  sincere,  are  generally  ready  to  repeat  the  Nv.nc 
Bimittis  with  Simeon.  The  question  of  knowing  God  is  a 
question  of  doing  the  will  of  God  which  is  written  in  large 
letters  in  the  laws  of  the  universe,  and  sketched  out  in  the 
ideal  purposes  which  have  as  yet  been  but  partly  achieved 
by  humanity.  Strictly  speaking,  there  is  no  conceptual  know- 
ledge of  God ;  it  is  only  of  particular  things  in  the  world  that 
there  can  be  a  conceptual  knowledge  (a  knowledge  of  the 
relations  which  they  sustain  to  other  things  or  to  the  diverse 
manifestations  of  the  cosmic  force).  Of  such  an  ultimate 
principle  of  reality  as  the  world-will  there  is  only  an  organic 
apprehension  on  our  part,  a  gradual  or  growing  apprehension 
by  our  whole  actual  and  potential  consciousness ;  only  such 
a  knowledge,  in  fact,  as  is  necessary  for  the  practical  purposes 
of  life,  necessary  to  constitute  for  us  a  permanent  motive 
towards  further  volition  and  development. 

For  the  design  argument  for  the  existence  of  God  Schopen- 
hauer has,  in  common  with  a  great  many  other  philosophers, 
the  most  supreme  contempt.  It  is  good  enough  in  his  eyes 
for  the  philistines,  for  those  who  cannot  understand  things 
unless  they  can  take  hold  ^  of  them  with  their  claws  and  feet 
and  teeth,  as  it  were ;  that  is  all.  The  people  who  look  at 
things  in  the  world  as  if  they  were  perfectly  real  on  their 
own  account,  and  then  proceed  to  ask  for  a  cause  of  these 
things,  are  really  too  godless  to  deserve  any  God ;  their  way 
of  looking  at  things  is  certainly  inferior  to  that  of  the  Asiatic 
Buddhist  or  the  European  idealist,  either  of  whom  is  conscious 
of  the  ideal  elements  that  enter  into  ordinary  reality.  The 
world,  when   looked  at  sympathetically  as  in  art,  is  already 

^  Cf.  oi  ovSiv  &\\o  oUntvoi  flvai  fl  ov  hv  Swui/rai  dirplf  toTi'  x^po'tv  Kafifffdm. — 
Plato,  Tlieait,  155. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     417 

seen  to  be   a  manifestation  of  a  spiritual  principle  or  ideal 
will. 

It  is,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  only  by  reason  of  their 
moraP    and   practical   value  that   religions   have   maintained 
their  hold  on  humanity.      The   tiuth  of  this  statement   can 
hardly  be  gainsaid.     Broadly  speaking,  religion  is  the  meta- 
physic   of  the   people;    it   represents   that   attitude  of  mind 
towards  the  world  as  a  whole  which  is  necessary  as  a  lever 
and  support  in  the  ordinary  actions   of  life.     It   should  be 
studied  as  the  science  of  the  implications  of  the  actions  of 
mankind,  of  the  relations   which   these   actions   sustain   and 
may  sustain  to  the  universe  as  a  whole.      The   chief  prac- 
tical difficulty  in  religion  is  to  show  men  how  they  are  at 
once  necessitated  and  free  in  their  actions,  how  in  virtue  of 
their  evil  will  they  are  enslaved,  and  are  yet,  in  virtue  of 
their  good  will  or  their  potentially  good  will,  the  subjects  of 
divine  grace  and  power,  and  consequently  free.     Religion,  in 
other  words,  must  be  connected  with  the  will.     The  worth  of 
a  religion,  as  Schopenhauer  says,  is  to  be  estimated  according 
to  the  greater  or  less  amount  of  truth  that  it  contains,  despite 
its  various  allegories  and  mysteries ;  this  means  that  the  value 
of  a  religion  consists  simply  in  its  practical  power  to  mould 
the  will  of  man  and  so  enable  him  to  overcome  the  evil  will 
that  is  in  him  and  to  rise  in  his  life  to  a  real  affirmation  of 
the  ideal  ends  and  purposes  that  are  partly  apparent  in  the 
world.     Even    by   truth   as  a   whole,   as   an    abstract   thing, 
Schopenhauer  means,   and  can  mean,   nothing  more  than  a 
general  consonance  between  our  ideas  and  our  practical  ex- 
perience  of   life.      Truth   is,   when  we  think  of    it,   nothing 
absolute  and  static  (consequently  nothing  that  we  can  know 

'  So  far  as  the  writer  has  been  able  to  infer  (not  having  as  yet  done  more  than 
run  through  the  first,  and  peruse  a  general  notice  of  the  second),  this  line  of 
argument  is  represented  in  two  notable  recent  books  which  treat  indirectly  or 
'lirectly  of  religion :  Mr  Kidd's  '  Social  Evolution '  and  Mr  Balfour's  '  Foundations 

"f  Belief.' 

.,:.  .  • '      2  D  ■■  ;■  .  :. 


418  Schopenhauer's  system. 

a  priori,  and  nothing  that  a  philosophy  ought  to  aim  at  as  a 
final  resting-place  for  the  mind) ;  it  is  a  kind  of  consonance 
in  a  right  life,  a  consonance  between  its  ideas  and  its  ex- 
periences ;  but  the  life  itself  is  greater  than  any  mere  conson- 
ance or  harmony  in  it.  We  ought  really  to  be  ashamed  of 
only  having  discovered  the  tnith  in  our  lives.  The  having 
done  so  would  only  mean  that  we  had  solved,  or  got  rid  of, 
a  personal  equation  that  stood  between  ourselves  and  the 
reality  of  things ;  it  would  not  necessarily  mean  that  we  had 
added  anything  to  the  life  of  humanity,  or  helped  the  world 
a  stage  onwards  in  its  evolution.  The  religion  whicli  fully 
accords  with  the  practical  experience  of  life,  and  gives  us  the 
best  possible  motive  force  so  far  as  this  life  is  concerned,  must 
be  the  true  (the  objective)  religion.  There  is  perhaps  no  other 
way  in  which  we  can  ever  prove  the  objectivity  of  a  religion 
than  this — its  power  of  affecting  and  redeeming  the  finite  will 
of  man,  and  of  infusing  a  divine  or  ideal  reality  into  his  life. 
Of  course  Schopenhauer  holds  that  all  religions,  Christianity 
among  the  rest,  are  true  only  sensic  ullegorico,  not  sensu  proprio. 
He  means  that  objectively  no  religion  is  literally  true  as  to 
the  events  and  the  mysteries  that  it  speaks  of,  but  that  sub- 
jectively most  of  them — except  mere  theism  and  rationahsm 
perhaps — are  to  a  certain  extent  true,  seeing  that  they  all 
more  or  less  vaguely  apprehend  something  that  is  essentially 
true  about  human  action.^  The  perfect  religion,  according  to 
this,  would  be  the  religion  which  sums  up  all  the  truths, 
all  the  essential  truths  about  the  human  will.  It  is  here, 
however,  just  the  same  as  it  is  in  the  case  of  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  of  art.  His  fatal  contempt  for  history  dispenses 
us  from  criticising  seriously  his  views  about  the  different  , 
religions  of  mankind,  which  he  did  not  see  and  did  not  make 
any  attempt  to  see  in  their  organic  historical  connection.  If 
he  had  not  been  so  much  of  the  crude  idealist,  so  much  a 

^  Cf.  supra,  p.  181. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     419 

literal  follower  of  Kant  (in  believing  that  time,  and  conse- 
quently process,  was  nothing  real  and  objective  in  the  world, 
but  only  something  subjective),  he  might  have  been  enabled  to 
see  the  different  religions  of  the  world  in  some  sort  of  historical 
connection,  representing  in  their  evolution  the  evolution  of  the 
real  attitude  man  ought  to  take  towards  the  universe  of  which 
he  forms  a  part.  It  often  strikes  one  as  strange  that  a  philo- 
sophy of  the  will  should  not  have  sought  to  connect  itself  more 
organically  with  the  philosophy  of  history.  This  indeed  seems 
to  be  the  one  thing  above  all  with  which  it  should  have 
sought  an  affiliation,  for  in  history  we  may  be  enabled  to  read 
the  nature  of  the  reality  which  the  will  is  trying  to  create. 
But  Schopenhauer  imagined  history  to  make  too  much  of  time 
and  time-process  and  time-evolution,  of  something  which  he 
thought  to  be  merely  sitbjective  and  not  objective.  Time,  how- 
ever, is  not  merely  subjective,  nor  are  any  of  the  categories. 
Kant  or  no  Kant,  time  refers  to  the  duration  of  experience ; 
and  experience,  volitional  experience,  is  the  highest  reality 
of  the  universe. 

IV.  The  theoretical  defects  in  Schopenhauer's  treatment  of 
religion  are  naturally  the  weak  points  that  correspond  to  his 
strong  points.  The  alpha  and  the  omega  of  the  matter  in  his 
eyes  is  simply  man's  being  able  to  "read  his  own  breast  aright," 
and  to  find  all  the  pain  and  defect  and  misery  of  the  world  in 
his  wayward  will,  in  his  tendency  to  seek  mere  personal  satis- 
faction, instead  of  affirming  in  his  spirit  and  in  his  volition  the 
eternal  Ideas  of  justice  and  righteousness  and  beauty  upon 
which  the  world  as  a  whole  is  established.  It  is  a  pity  that 
Schopenhauer  had  not  the  full  courage  of  his  own  principle  of 
will.  According  to  him,  it  is  only,  after  all,  in  his  mind  and 
intellect  that  man  can  affirm  the  Ideas.  He  could  not  see  how 
man  could  actually  affirm  the  Ideas  in  his  will  and  practical 
life.     There  is,  it  is  true,  language  in  Schopenhauer  to  the 


420  Schopenhauer's  system. 

effect  that  the  intellectual  perception  of  the  folly  of  egoistic 
and  selfish  volition  may  actually  affect  the  will  itself,  but  there 
is  no  thought  on  the  matter  vhich  is  woven  into  his  positive 
philosophy  of  will.     This  indeed  is  the  defect  of  his  system. 
He  could  see  oidy  the  necessity  of  eradicating  the  finite  evil 
will,  and  could  say  nothing  about  the  perfected  human  will. 
He  went  as  far  as  any  man  could  go  in  overturning  the  merely 
external  and  static  and  ontological  element  in  religious  faith. 
Anything  in  religion  that  did  not  seem  at  the  same  time  to 
exist  in  man  himself,  and  anything  that  had  no  bearing  on 
the  will  of  man — anything  that  was  external  to  man's  very 
life  and  volition — was  to  him  not  of  the.   essence  of  religion 
at  all.     He  even  wages  war  against  the  expression  God,  and 
rejoices  in  the  fact  of  the  difficulties  that  missionaries  in  his 
own  day  were  finding  in  the  attempt  to  translate  the  opening 
words  of   the  book  of  Genesis  into  Chinese.      He  says  that 
that  language  seemed   to   have   no  exact  equivalent  for  the 
word  God.     He  felt  that  a  mere  external  God  was  nothing 
of  value  to  us.     The  very  idea  of  an  external  God  was  in  his 
eves  the  beginning  of  that  theism  which  makes  beings  other 
than  man  himself  accountable  for  the  existence  of  evil,  the 
irreligion  which  wishes  to  shift  the  blame  of  sin  on  to  some 
one  else  (as  the  man  in  Genesis  is  said  to  have  done)  rather  than 
keep  it  one's  self.     Unfortunately,  it  was  always  rather  the 
evil  than  the  good  that  Schopenhauer  was  thinking  of ;  he 
had  to  do  justice  to  that,  had  to  give  that  its  fidl  weight. 
And  if  evil  had  to  be  crucified  anywhere,  it  was  in  man's  own 
breast  that  it  had  to  be  crucified.     One  often  wishes  that  he 
had  rigidly  adhered  to  this  idea  of  the  evil  that  is  in  the 
world   being  due  to  something  that  has  taken  place  in  the 
will  of  man,  rather  than  in  the  author  of  the  universe  or  in 
the  universe  itself.     "  Que  de  tous  ces  maux,"  as  Eousseau 
said  in  conversation  with  Voltaire,  "  il  n'y  en  avait  pas  un 

^  Les  Confessions  (ddition  Biblio.  Charp.,  Paris,  1886),  p.  420. 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  op  religion.     421 

dont  la  Providence  ne  £At  disculp(5e,  et  qui  n'eftt  sa  source 
dans  Tabus  que  I'homn'e  a  fait  de  ses  faculties,  plus  que  dans 
la  nature  elle-mome."  If  he  had  done  this,  his  world-will 
would  not  have  been  so  much  of  a  devii  and  so  little  of  a  god. 

The  Christian  believer,  if  he  were  a  "  true  mystic,"  as  a 
Molinist  would  say,  migliL  easily  reply  with  much  force  to 
Schopenhauer  just  at  this  point,  might  in  fact  try  to  show 
him  that  this  very  connection  with  the  will  of  man  was  to 
be  found  in  the  Christian  religion.  But  Schopenhauer  would 
have  refused  to  listen  to  what  such  a  man  had  to  say,  knowing 
very  well  that  the  temptation  to  dogmatism  would  be  too  strong 
for  him,  and  that  he  would  immediately  proceed  to  run  out 
the  guns  of  dogmatic  theology,  to  thunder  against  the  ontologies 
of  every  other  religious  or  irreligious  system,  forgetting  the  fact 
that  the  ontology  of  Christianity  (as  of  any  other  religion)  is 
not  the  thing  of  primary  importance  about  it.  Religious  onto- 
logy indeed  has  brought  rest  to  wonderfully  few  souls,  but  the 
suffering  Christ  and  the  Buddha  who  humiliated  himself  to 
know  suffering  and  pain  have  brought  rest  to  many.  Nowhere 
is  the  thinness  and  the  hollowness  of  theism  so  mercilessly 
shown  up  as  it  is  in  Schopenhauer.  He  compels  those  people 
who  profess  to  hold  to  theism,  without  acknowledging  Judaism 
or  Christianity,  to  reflect  seriously  about  the  historical  truth 
and  the  logical  tenability  of  their  standing-ground.  One  can- 
not help  thinking  that  his  compulsion  is  justifiable. 

Schopenhauer  is  so  anxious  in  all  this  to  insist  that  religion 
shall  affect  the  will  and  be  within  the  individual  person,  that 
he  often  makes  the  mistake  of  speaking  as  if  the  power  of 
affecting  the  will  were  the  only  logical  content  of  a  religion — as 
if,  in  fact,  any  "  content "  would  do  for  a  religion  if  it  had  the 
power  of  affecting  the  will.  A  real  religion,  however,  must 
present  to  man  a  rational  content,  a  content  that  satisfies  his 
reason  as  well  as  his  will,  and  his  conscious  knowledge  about 
the  system  of  things.     By  rational  content,  again,  Schopen- 


422  Schopenhauer's  system. 

hauer  (broadly  interpreted)  could  mean  only  a  congruity  or 
consonance  with  practical  experience.  Why  not  then  say  that 
the  best  religion  after  all  is  simply  my  practical  experience  itself, 
with  its  real  perception  of  its  own  nugatoriness  and  inward  con- 
tradiction ?  This  is  just  what  a  great  many  people  who  cannot 
persuade  themselves  of  the  truth  of  any  religious  system  do 
believe.  It  is  what  Schopenhauer  himself  does  in  substance 
say  and  teach,  and  it  marks  the  limitations  of  his  thought. 
He  is  at  one  with  Buddhism  in  refusing  to  explain  man's  life 
by  anything  outside  himself.  Man  is  in  his  eyes  alternately 
the  agent  and  the  patient  in  the  game  of  life,  a  being  who  at 
once  acts  and  suffers  and  seeks  to  escape  from  the  consequences 
of  his  action ;  he  may  become,  too,  his  own  saviour  and  re- 
deemer by  negating  altogether  the  finite  will  which  is  tiie 
source  of  all  his  misery. 

This  idea  of  man  being  at  once  the  supreme  agent  and 
patient  in  the  universe,  at  once  the  creator  and  the  destroyer 
and  the  saviour  of  the  world,  comes  from  the  subjective 
idealism  m  which  we  have  found  Schopenhauer  to  be  impli- 
cated from  the  beginning.  But  it  is  not  true  that  the  in- 
tellect of  man  reveals  to  him  a  world  which  is  merely  a 
thing  of  his  intellect.  The  intellect,  as  we  have  seen,  pre- 
sents to  us  only  that  which  is  in  relation  to  our  will ;  and  in 
our  experience  we  are  conscious  of  being  in  relation  to  a  will 
which  is  the  actual  support  of  our  merely  natural  will,  and 
the  possible  support  of  our  spiritual  will  also.  Schopenhauer 
could  not  think  of  the  Ideas  as  indicating  a  plane  of  reality 
up  to  which  man  is  to  struggle  with  the  divine  help  or  the 
help  of  the  universe  behind  him,  a  plane  upon  which  man  may 
become  real,  because  it  is  real.  Seeing  that  the  world  was 
only  an  "  idea,"  the  higher  Ideas  of  beauty  and  goodness  also 
became  merely  "  ideas."  And  so  the  whole  of  life  appeared 
to  be  an  illusory  thing,  merely  a  continual  oscillation  between 
the  will  to  live  and  the  will  to  die — one  continued  imagin- 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      423 

ary  affirmation  and  denial  of  the  world  as  a  whole.  This, 
indeed,  is  of  the  letter  of  the  system,  and  is  often  presented 
as  the  whole  sif,'nificance  of  it.  If  man's  wayward  .self,  how- 
ever, is  to  be  redeemed  and  saved  for  ideal  pnrposes,  it  must 
be  through  the  help  and  stay  of  a  will  which  is  more  powerful 
than  his  own. 

The  cosmic  will  with  which  we  are  in  contact  from  the 
beginning  to  the  end  of  our  lives  is  stronger  than  our  own 
will ;  and  it  is  of  that  cosmic  will  that  our  intellect  makes 
us  conscious — not  of  a  so-callod  phenomenal  world  which  is 
the  intellect's  own  creation.  Man's  higher  will  may  attain 
to  a  reality  in  this  cosmic  will,  if  he  will  but  trust  tlie 
affirmation  of  his  consciousness,  which  tells  him  that  he  is  in 
relation  to  it  throughout  his  whole  experience.  The  truth 
of  our  practical  experience  is  our  relation  to  a  supreme 
will  and  our  dependence  upon  it.  It  may  again  be  said 
that  this  is  only  a  working  out  in  relation  to  the  will  of 
wliat  other  philosophers  have  worked  out  in  relation  to  the 
idea.  It  is  so  to  a  large  extent.  But  then  it  is  to  be 
again  remembered  that  it  is  will  which  gives  the  element  of 
reality  to  things.^     If  man  can  become  real  as  will,  he  will 

'  I  find  an  adniiriible  apprehension  and  exposition  of  the  value  of  volitional 
effort  in  enabling  us  to  find  a  spiritual  order  behind  the  natural  order,  in  a  paper 
contributed  to  the  'International  Journal  of  Ethics'  (Oct.  1895),  by  Professor 
William  James,  of  Harvard  University.  I  summarise  that  whole  paper  to  my 
own  mind  as  an  apprehension  of  the  possibilities  of  the  philosophy  of  will.  The 
following  lines  give  a  vigorous  presentation  of  the  way  in  which  that  philosophy 
may  be  applied  to  the  religious  problem  :  "  It  is  only  by  risking  our  persons  from 
one  hour  to  another  that  we  live  at  all.  And  often  enough  our  faith  beforehand 
in  an  uncertified  result  is  the  only  thing  that  makes  the  result  come  true.  Suppose, 
for  instance,  that  you  are  climbing  a  mountain  and  have  worked  yourself  into  a 
position  from  which  your  only  escape  is  by  a  terrible  leap.  Have  faith  .  .  .  and 
your  feet  are  nerved  to  its  accomplishment.  But  mistrust  yourself,  and  think 
of  ,  .  .  maybes  ,  .  .  and  .  .  .  roll  in  the  abyss.  In  such  a  case  (and  it 
belongs  to  an  enormous  class),  the  part  of  wisdom  as  well  as  of  courage  is  to 
helieve  what  is  in  the  line  of  your  needs,  for  only  by  belief  is  the  need  fulfilled. 
.  .  .  You  make  one  or  the  other  of  two  possible  universes  true  by  your  trust  or 
mistrust,  both  universes  having  been  only  maybes,  in  this  particular,  before  you 
contributed  your  act. "  


424  Schopenhauer's  system. 

become  really  real  and  not  merely  ideally  real,  if  we  may 
so  speak.  Christianity  itself  teaches  that  man  is  working 
for  a  perfected  body  which  shall  be  an  expression  of  a 
perfected  will,  and  that  only  with  such  a  body  or  with 
such  real  possibilities  can  he  be  enabled  to  afflrm  the  ideal 
will. 

In  remembering,  then,  that  will  is  {ought  to  he)  rational 
or  evolving  will,  we  have  in  our  hands  the  best  means  of 
reconciling  Schopenhauer's  affirmations  about  subjective — per- 
sonal or  psychological — religion  (or  religion  on  its  loractical 
side),  and  his  denials  about  objective — dogmatic  or  ontological 
— religion  (or  religion  on  its  theoretical  side).  There  is  a 
reality  in  the  world  which  we  can  apprehend  with  our  con- 
sciousness and  feel  ourselves  related  to  in  our  ordinary  life. 
In  philosophical  language,  God  may  be  brought  within  the 
world  and  shown  to  be  the  "  truth "  of  ourselves,  and  not 
merely  of  an  external  or  objective  universe.  With  some  little 
care  it  may  be  shown  that  the  will  of  the  world  sustains  just 
such  a  relation  to  man  as  Schopenhauer  found  to  be  of  the 
essence  of  all  true  religion.  If  Schopenhauer  had  not  started 
with  the  idea  that  the  world-will  is  essentially  unconscious, 
and  that  consciousness  exists  only  in  the  brain  of  man, 
he  would  not  have  found  the  chief  elements  of  religion  in 
the  individual's  mere  power  of  denying  intellectually  the 
natural  basis  of  his  life.  If  he  had  had  a  hold  upon  history 
as  a  process,  and  upon  the  world  as  a  rational  instead  of  an 
irrational  evolution,  he  might  have  found  the  redemptive 
agencies  to  be  at  work  in  the  world  as  a  whole  which  he 
found  to  exist  only  in  the  intellect  of  the  individual,  with  its 
merely  logical  or  ideal  affirmation  and  denial.  His  turning  to 
Eastern  religions  to  find  in  them  the  elements  which  were 
lacking  in  the  shallow  Protestantism  and  rationalism  of  his 
day,  was  natural  enough  in  the  circumstances.  Some  writers 
have    thought    that    Schopenhauer's  greatest   significance  for 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      425 

European  thought  lies  in  his  introduction  of  the  ideas  of 
Eastern  religions  into  the  West.  He  certainly  put  in  a  plea 
for  these  ideas  when  the  general  deification  of  the  under- 
standing in  the  Aufkliirung  had  taken  away  from  men  or 
caused  them  to  lose  sight  of  the  more  spiritual  aspects  of 
their  traditional  religion.  Eastern  religions  have  rendered 
great  service  by  proclaiming  tlie  inevitableness  or  the  ne- 
cessity of  suffering  and  death,  as  things  essentially  and  or- 
ganically connected  with  the  finite  life  of  man.  Indirectly, 
too,  they  tend  to  show  that  the  truest  or  the  most  objective 
religion  is  after  all  the  least  dogmatic  affair  that  can  well 
be  imagined,  being,  on  the  contrary,  that  whicli  is  most  in- 
timately connected  with  the  life  and  experience  of  man.  To 
see  what  kind  of  man  one  is,  to  see  the  ineradicable  contra- 
diction that  exists  between  our  power  to  contemplate  the  ideal 
life  and  our  power  to  realise  it,  is  the  best  way  of  realising 
one's  need  of  salvation  as  a  real  and  not  as  a  figurative  thing. 
Even  before  Buddhism,  Brahmanism  had  proclaimed  what 
Schopenhauer  calls  the  "transcendental  significance  of  our 
actions,"  had  shown  how  our  volition  connects  us  with,  and 
makes  us  in  a  sense  responsible  for,  all  the  evil  that  exists 
ill  the  world,  and  how  physical  evil  is  to  be  traced  to  the 
moral  evil  inherent  in  the  will.  Brahmanism  insists  that 
the  whole  of  man's  activity  is  merely  an  expression  of  what 
he  was  at  birth,  or  before  birth,  of  what  he  ultimately  and 
essentially  is ;  and  that  through  his  own  guilt  the  individual 
is  implicated  in  all  the  evil  of  the  world.  It  is  wholly 
irreligious,  according  to  Brahmanism,  to  connect  our  evil 
deeds  with  any  one  or  anything  but  ourselves.  True  re- 
pentance and  resignation  and  absolute  self-abandonment  are 
the  first  steps  towards  salvation. 

Both  Brahmanism  and  Buddhism  indicate  a  path  along 
which  we  must  approach  the  shrine  of  religion,  and  it  was 
perhaps  desirable  in  this  connection  for   Europe   to    become 


I 


426  Schopenhauer's  system. 

acquainted  with  an  older  religious  experience  than  its  own. 
Schopenhauer  was  always  right  in  teaching  that  the  liter- 
alism and  the  realism  and  even  the  liberalism  of  average 
Protestantism  wore  all  very  far  from  tlie  spirit  of  esoteric 
Christianity  or  of  esoteric  Catholicism.  "  Natural  realism " 
is  apt  to  prove  fatal  to  the  interests  of  true  religion.  It  is 
apt  to  make  men  think  that  the  world  is  perfectly  satisfactory 
as  it  is.  All  mere  literalism  in  religion  tends  to  draw  men's 
minds  rather  to  the  setting  or  the  framework  of  religious  ideas 
than  to  these  ideas  themselves.  And  all  mere  liberalism,  or 
rationalism  in  religion,  is  more  apt  to  enslave  man  than  to  free 
him  (as  it  professes  to  do  at  first  sight),  because  it  encourages 
him  to  will  over  again  his  natural  life  instead  of  seeking 
a  spiritual  birth  that  may  become  the  entrance  to  new  life. 
The  reality  of  divine  grace  can  never  be  fully  appreciated 
where  there  is  lacking  a  profound  recognition  of  the  help- 
lessness of  man  in  so  far  as  he  is  the  slave  of  his  wayward 
will  or  self.  Eationalism,  with  its  impossible  glorification  of 
the  intellect  of  man,  is  really  to  be  distrusted  morally  too; 
it  leads  to  a  presumption  of  mind  that  is  very  far  from 
the  humility  which  is  the  best  outcome  of  the  experience  of 
life.     . 

Much  of  this,  it  is  evident,  is  of  the  very  essence  of  Chris- 
tianity, and  Schopenhauer  himself  knew  how  near  his  own 
system  ran  to  precipitating  itself  into  that.  He  said  once 
or  twice  that  his  system  of  philosophy  was  substantially  in 
agreement  with  Christianity,  and  that  it  addressed  itself  to 
the  same  problems  that  Christianity  did.  We  must  not,  how- 
ever, be  misled  by  the  undoubted  analogy  that  exists  between 
much  of  his  teaching  and  Christianity,  and  by  his  own  admis- 
sion of  that  fact.  The  latter  was  no  concession  to  Chris- 
tianity, nor  a  withdrawal  on  his  part  of  the  illusionism  and 
pessimism  which  he  taught  about  life  as  a  whole.  He  be- 
lieved that  life  was  essentially  unsatisfactory,  even  although 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.      427 

he  once  or  twice  suggested  in  his  writings  that  the  one  thing 
we  can  do  in  the  world  is  to  understard  our  experience  and 
to  hcype.  Life  is,  in  his  eyes,  illusory  so  long  as  the  indi- 
vidual is  bent  upon  the  furtherance  and  maintenance  of  his 
own  life  and  personality,  and  even  the  desire  to  live  over  again 
in  another  form  of  life — as  one  is,  mit  Haut  taid  Haar,  as 
some  Germans  contemptuously  put  it — shows  the  primal  error 
which  is  somehow  implicated  in  the  very  roots  of  the  finite 
personality.  But,  as  has  been  suggested,  experience  seems  to 
witness  to  the  fact  that  the  will  of  the  world  supports  to  some 
extent  the  will  of  the  individual  in  his  search  for  beauty  and 
goodness ;  and  it  may  do  so  infinitely. 

We  may  say  that  the  will  of  the  world  is  God,  and  that 
through  a  renewed  or  perfected  will  man  becomes  the  son  of 
Clod.  But  Schopenhauer  would  have  objected  himself  to  all 
such  particularising  of  the  fundamental  drift  of  his  system. 
He  refused  to  see  anything  else  in  the  world  than  the  alter- 
nation between  the  self-assertion  of  the  finite  will  and  the 
self-abnegation  of  the  enlightened  mind  which  "  affirms  "  the 
Ideas.  Once  again,  however,  the  weakness  of  all  mere  phil- 
osophies of  religion  is  that  they  seem  merely  able  to  set  forth 
the  conditions  of  establishing  harmony  in  our  thoughts  about 
the  universe,  while  utterly  unable  to  affirm  that  to  be  an 
objective  reality  or  objective  "  content "  in  things  which  they 
find  to  be  a  necessity  of  thought.  It  has  already  been  sug- 
gested that  the  courageous  idealist  (the  critical  or  Kantian 
idealist  even)  ought  not  to  be  ashamed  of  stating  that  to  he 
actually  true  about  the  world  which  he  has  found  to  be  a  condi- 
tion of  its  real  perfection  or  formal  intelligibility.  The  world, 
for  example,  might  be  shown  to  exhibit  punitive  and  restora- 
tive agencies  which  are  of  the  essence  of  true  religion,  and  in 
this  way  the  reality  of  religion  could  be  set  forth.  Schopen- 
liauer  has  taught  us  to  regard  the  will  as  the  deepest  thing 
about  life.     We   must   consequently  regard   the   effort  after 


428  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ideal  volition  and  ideal  purpose  to  be  for  the  individual  the 
highest  reality  in  the  universe.^ 

There  is  no  need  of  examining  at  any  great  length  into 
the  extent  to  which  Schopenhauer  understood  Buddhism  and 
other  religious  systems,  or  indeed  the  extent  to  which  he  is  to 
be  held  responsible  for  drawing  the  attention  of  the  Western 
mind  to  Eastern  religions.  Many  of  Goethe's  best  poems 
represent  very  decidedly  the  influence  of  Eastern  ideas ;  and 
Herder  and  Hamann  also  get  inspiration  from  the  same  source. 
The  thing  perhaps  that  pleased  Schopenhauer  most  about 
Buddhism  was  its  exaltation  of  the  spirit  of  religion  over  the 
letter.  The  Christian  believer  will  doubtless  say  that  it  is 
easy  enough  for  a  religion  that  has  little  letter  to  boast  of 
to  exalt  the  spirit  over  the  letter,  and  may  find  superior 
comfort  in  the  historic  character  and  philosophy  of  history  of 
his  own  religion.  As  a  philosopher,  however,  Schopenhauer 
cared  only  for  the  universal  elements  in  all  religious  belief. 
In  this  he  is  a  true  follower  of  Kant.  We  see,  too,  that 
his  religious  ideas  show  a  satisfaction  with  the  mere  formal 
essence  of  religious  insight,  just  as  his  artistic  ideas  show  a 
satisfaction  with  the  mere  formal  characteristics  of  beauty.^ 
He  did  not  see  exactly  what  it  was  that  art  had  to  idealise 
or  ought  to  idealise.  He  did  say  that  it  was  the  will  of  man 
that  religion  must  perfect,  and  one  wishes  that  he  had  in  his 
theory  of  art  said  that  it  was  human  character  and  human 


^  In  this  very  effort  (with  all  that  it  implies — our  rising  above  whatever  is 
tnei'cly  natural  and  tentative  in  our  lives)  the  will  obtains  a  consciousness  of 
itself,  which  is  also  the  deepest  insight  into  the  universe  of  reality.  Wlieu 
philosophers  grasp  this,  when  they  see  that  the  highest  insight  (or  vision  or  con- 
templation) comes  as  the  result  of  a  volition,  they  will  have  in  their  hands  an 
idea  which  will  enable  them  to  connect  in  a  system  philosophy  and  science  and 
art  and  life.  This  is  the  point  where  one  could  begin  to  write  out  over  again  the 
subject-matter  of  the  present  volume,  so  as  to  do  more  apparent  justice  to  in- 
tellectual philosophy.  Fortunately,  however,  the  "  upward  way  "  and  tlie  "  down- 
ward way  "  are  one  :  &Sbs  Avia  k6.tu  /ila  Kal  uvri)  (Heracliti  Eph.  lleliq.,  Ixix.) 

»  Supra,  p.  272.       —  '-^ ; 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     429 

life  which  art  seeks  to  perfect.  But  he  defined  the  perfection 
of  the  will  of  man  only  in  a  negative  way.  Ho  looked 
upon  the  will  of  the  individual  as  altogether  a  rebellious 
affair,  as  a  breaking  away  from  the  timeless  peace  of  the 
unconscious  will  of  the  universe.  He  cannot,  therefore,  be 
said  to  have  given  anything  like  an  adequate  account  of 
the  content  or  the  reality  of  religious  experience  or  of  the 
religious  life  as  such.  He  ought  to  have  seen  the  full  con- 
sequences of  his  admission  that  the  instinct  to  live  endlessly 
is  the  deepest  thing  about  our  lives.  If  the  desire  after  fuller 
life  is  the  deepest  thing  in  our  lives,  it  is  also,  according  to 
the  general  principles  of  the  philosophy  of  will,  the  deepest 
thing  in  all  nature.  And  if  it  is  the  deepest  thing  in  all 
nature,  a  belief  in  the  scientific  postulate  of  continuity  ought 
to  make  us  feel  that  nature  cannot  disappoint  us  just  at  the 
stage  where  she  seems  to  be  attaining  to  her  highest  reality. 
The  cosmic  will  is  manifestly  seeking  a  perfect  assertion  or 
individuation  of  itself  in  the  personality  of  man. 

Schopenhauer,  however,  does  not  believe  so  much  in  the 
continuity  of  experience,  or  in  the  upward  tendency  of  the 
TOcess  of  evolution,  as  in  the  cyclic  character  of  cosmic  life. 
Life  is  so  illusory  to  him,  or  rather  finite  life  is  so  illusory  to 
lim,  that  no  good  thing  can  be  expected  to  come  out  of  the 
world  until  the  illusoriness  and  unreality  of  finite  life  as  such 
are  definitely  recognised.  He  seems  to  hold  that  when  this  is 
recognised  the  universe  will  return  to  its  state  of  primal  un- 
consciousness. Schopenhauer  is  honest  enough  to  scoff  at  the 
•luestion  or  idea  of  immortality,  in  accordance  with  his  doctrine 
that  individuality  is  only  an  appearance  of  the  intellect.  Now, 
as  matter  of  fact,  it  is  not  the  intellect  that  individualises 
tilings ;  the  intellect,  or  thought,  always  tends  to  universalise 
things,  to  see  them  only  in  the  light  of  their  universal  relations. 
(This  truth  receives  illustration  in  the  tendency  of  most  phil- 
osophers to  run  up  all  reality  into  an  impersonal  idea.)     It  is 


430  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  will  which  is  striving  after  more  complete  individuality, 
after  ever  more  and  more  concrete  expression ;  at  least  the 
will  of  man  is  always  striving  after  a  more  complete  assertion 
of  his  personality. 

This  idea  is  as  old  as  Duns  Scotus,  who  held  that  it  was  the 
individual  peculiarity  (hwcceitas)  of  a  thing  that  in  the  end 
completely  constituted  its  reality.  Each  being  is  striving  to 
be  perfect  in  its  kind.  Each  man  has  in  himself  the  capacity 
of  becoming  a  perfect  man  if  he  is  willing  to  submit  his  finite 
will  to  the  infinite  will  of  the  world.  The  merits  of  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy  and  religion  all  lie  along  the  line  of  his 
substitution  of  a  volitional  and  practical  attitude  towards  reality 
for  a  merely  reflective  and  speculative  one.  The  deepest 
meaning  of  reality  is  to  be  found  in  the  more  or  less  articulate 
consciousness  that  we  have  of  our  own  activity.  It  is  as 
futile  as  it  is  meaningless  for  man  to  seek  for  the  meaning  of 
things  outside  his  own  practical  activity  and  moral  life — futile 
because  the  intellect  has  not  been  given  us  to  tell  us  about 
the  nature  of  external  reality,  and  meaningless  because,  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  our  volitional  experience  seems  to  be  the  high- 
est reality  of  the  physical  universe.  It  is  the  conflict  in  the 
will  of  man  between  his  wayward  or  evil  will  and  his  rational 
will  to  which  the  philosophy  of  religion  must  first  address 
itself.  A  philosophy  of  religion  based  upon  the  idea  offers  to 
man  a  solution  of  the  world  in  terms  of  impersonal  thought; 
but  such  a  philosophy  has  little  to  say  of  this  "  present  body 
of  death,"  this  wayward  tendency  in  man's  own  nature.  The 
defects  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion  are  fairly 
apparent.  It  is  lacking  in  intellectual  con^^ent.  The  will  of 
which  he  speaks  is  unintelligible  rather-  than  intelligible — 
something  to  be  distrusted  rather  than  trusted.  Our  very 
consciousness  of  ourselves,  in  fact,  had  to  be  distrusted ;  it  was 
only  as  a  blind  impulse  that  we  were  to  think  of  the  self; 
the   idea  that  we  "  presented   ourselves  to  ourselves  in  our 


Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  religion.     431 

thought"  was  an  illusion.  Now,  on  the  contrary,  our  con- 
sciousness of  ourselves  as  striving  towards  the  realisation  of  a 
completed  individuality  is  not  to  be  distrusted,  just  because  the 
root  of  our  personality  is  will.  The  will  is  destined  to  accom- 
pHsh  what  our  consciousness  tells  us  it  has  begun  in  ourselves. 
Schopenhauer's  treatment  of  religion  lacks  objective  reality, 
because  he  did  not  make  the  effort  he  ought  to  have  made 
to  grasp  the  rationality  of  the  will  that  is  in  the  universe, 
and  that  is  the  support  of  our  life  and  volition.  All  the 
confusionism  and  all  the  illusionism  with  which  his  system  is 
so  largely  taken  up,  simply  speak  of  the  struggle  and  the  process 
of  education  that  the  finite  will  has  to  go  through  before  it 
really  seeks  to  will  along  with  the  rational  will  of  the 
world. 


432 


CHAPTER    IX. 

THE    METAPIIYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER. 

"  In  philosophy,  the  intellect  is  applied  to  something  for  which  it  is  not 
Jit  all  intended  nor  calculated  [the  study],  namely,  of  existence  in  general, 
and  in  a. id  for  itself." — Schopenhauer. 

"Et  tout  est  li\,  il  n'y  a,  dans  le  nionde,  pas  d'autre  volonte  que  cette 
force  qui  poussc  tout  k  la  vie,  a  une  vie  de  plus  en  plus  developpee  et 
superieure." — E.  Zola,  '  Le  Docteur  Pascal.' 

The  metaphysic  of  Schopenhauer  is  one  of  the  strangest 
things  in  the  history  of  philosophy.  In  a  sense  it  is  not 
philosophy  at  all ;  or  at  most  it  is  only  its  consummate 
effrontery  and  pan  -  illusionism  which  is  its  chief  title  to 
recognition.  It  proclaims  to  philosophy  in  a  highly  realistic 
and  almost  spectacular  manner  the  limits  of  philosophy. 
There  had  been  negative  philosophies,  of  course,  before 
Schopenhauer's,  such  as  the  scepticism  of  Pyrrho  or  that  of 
Hume  and  the  decadence  philosophy  of  Proclus,  with  the 
descending  development  it  professed  to  find,  in  the  course  of 
the  universe ;  but  these  systems  for  the  most  part  wore  the 
garb  of  philosophy  much  more  than  Schopenhauer's  did ;  they 
were  all  of  them  expressions  of  a  real  despair  from  the  side 
of  philosophy  of  solving  the  question  of  absolul^e  knowledge. 
Schopenhauer  never — the  time  of  his  youthful  devotion  to 
Plato  apart — believed  very  much  in  absolute  knowledge,  oi 
at  least  he  never  sought  for  it  as  such.     He  knew  that  the 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OP   SCHOPENHAUER.  433 

philosophers  sought  for  absolute  knowledge,  and  with  his  brain 
he  went  with  them  to  some  extent,  but  he  could  never  per- 
suade himself  that  they  were  right.     He  did  believe  in  insight 
and  he  sought  insight,  but  he  is  eternally  different  from  the 
rational  philosophers  in  his  view  of  insight.     Insight  for  him 
meant  a  refined  sense  for  life — always  a  sense ;  his  nascent 
youthful  personality  represented  the  effort  of  a  soul  not  so 
much  to  understand  life  as  to  feel  it,  to  feel  out  for  itself  a 
reliable  attitude  towards  things.     He  is  surely  one  of  the  very 
few  philosophers  who  commenced  life  in  a  commercial  office. 
This  is  something  of  a  guarantee  for  the  reality  of  his  hold 
upon  the  world ;  like  Socrates,  he  knew  men  in  the  market- 
place.    Nevertheless  he  saw  the  necessity  of  a  philosophy  or 
a  metaphysic,  of  an  abbreviated   statement  of  the  different 
iioints  of  view  from  which  the  world  can  be  regarded.     He 
grew  up,  in  other  words,  to  an   appreciation  of  Kant — and 
Kant  is  really  a  solar   system,  as  Jean   Paul  put    it — and, 
like   Herder  and   Schiller  and  Goethe  and  many  others  of 
his  contemporaries,  he  felt  that  Kant   had  said    essentially 
the  last  word  about  mere  knoivledgc.     Every  educated  modern 
man    must    reckon   with    Kant,  he  would  have  said.     Life, 
Kant,  Plato — life,  knowledge,  artistic  feeling,  in  other  words 
—Schopenhauer    assimilated    these    three    things ;    and    his 
metaphysical   significance  is   that  he  tried   somehow  to   ex- 
press (in  the  language  of  the  schools  and  in   the  language 
of  science,   and  in   a  new   language    of    outspokenness    and 
breadth    which    the    schools    had    not    cultivated)    the    fact 
that  it  is  all  very  well  to  have  philosophical  doubts  about 
the  limits  of  knowledge,    but    that    it    is    a    poor    thing  to 
stop  there ;  that  it  is  rather  an  indication  of  naivetd  or  of 
lack    of   breadth    of    education    ever    to    have   thought   that 
the  universe  might  possibly  go  into  a  rational  formula ;   in 
short,  that   life  is   a  much   greater   thing  than   philosophy, 
I  and  that  philosophers  to   be  perfectly  honest  ought  to  say 

2  £ 


434  Schopenhauer's  system. 

that  the  most  philosophical  thing  in  the  world  is  to  cease 
to  be  merely  a  philosopher.  That  is  why  Goethe  appreciated 
the  young  Schopenhauer  and  the  first  edition  of  his  main 
work,  and  why  Wagner  later  wrote  to  Schopenhauer  that 
he  accepted  in  the  main  his  theory  about  the  world  being 
will,  and  why  many  men  who  have  indeed  some  culture, 
but  who  have  to  fight  the  battle  of  life  with  might  and  main, 
read  Schopenhauer  and  will  continue  to  read  him. 

The  philosopliical  fallacy  par  excellence  is  to  make  every- 
thing of  philosophy,  to  pronounce  the  world  insoluble  if 
it  will  not  go  into  the  idee.  Schopenhauer  himself  is  hardly 
free  from  the  influence  of  tliis  fallacy.  He  takes  it  for 
granted,  as  we  have  seen,  that  peace  of  mind  or  contempla- 
tion is  the  greatest  thing  in  the  world,  and  that  it  is 
simply  horrible  to  think  that  the  thousand  pains  and  cares 
of  life  should  invade  that  peace.  Still  it  is  his  message 
to  philosophy  that,  in  explaining  the  world,  it  should  use  a 
principle  which  will  not  cause  it  to  surrender  its  very 
existence,  but  which  will  leave  it  as  before  the  queen  of 
the  sciences  —  a  principle  which  will  bear  the  weight  of 
reality  and  be  capable  of  infinite  application.  "  Schematise 
knowledge  as  you  will,"  he  practically  says,  "  but  do  not 
make  the  mistake  of  taking  knowledge  to  be  a  primary 
thing  when  it  is  not  such :  a  sense  for  life  is  the  only 
thing  that  will  in  the  end  tell  you  what  the  principle  of 
the  world  is."  And  indeed  the  world  will  not  go  into  the 
idea,  and  if  it  could  there  would  be  no  world  left,  but 
only  an  "  idea  that  thinks  itself,"  as  in  Hegel's  philosophy. 
We  want,  in  short,  a  real  principle  to  explain  reality,  a 
principle  which  allows  for  the  "  more  things  in  heaven  and 
earth "  than  are  in  philosophy,  and  which  allows  of  de- 
velopment and  expansion.  Will  does  this ;  it  is  a  real 
thing ;  and  it  is  continually  seeking  to  manifest  itself  afresh. 
It  is  not   limited  either    in   a    backward    or   in    a  forward 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  435 

regard ;  it  has  had  a  limitless  past  and  may  have  a  limitless 
future. 

I.  The  scope  of   Schopenhauer's  metaphysic   can   best  be 
seen  by   looking   at    some   of    the    broadest   features   of  his 
thought.     As  to  its  most  general  features,  his  metaphysic  is  a 
proclamation  in  large  letters  of  the  illusionism  vvliich  we  have 
found  to  characterise  so  much  of  his  thinking.      It  is  all  the 
illusionisms  of  the  system,  those  pertaining  to  art  and  ethics 
and    knowledge   and    ontology    and    religion,   taken    together 
and  put   upon   the  basis  of   his  fundamental  principle,  will. 
But  it  is  more  than  that.     Schopenhauer  really  holds  that, 
take  life  as  we  will,  we  shall  always  find  it  full  of  illusion. 
The  final  illusionism,  as  it  were,  whicli  he  teaches  is  not  a 
mere  result  or  a  mere  summation  of  the  difficulties  he  had 
about  different  things ;  it  is  radical  and  fundamental.     "We 
cannot  get  out  of  his  pessimism  by  saying  that  philosophy, 
doubtless,  naturally  abounds  in  dialectic  and  paradox  and  con- 
tradiction, but  that  life,  on  the  contrary,  when  taken   as   a 
whole,  is  fairly  consistent  with  itself.     Schopenhauer  would 
insist  that  he  takes  life  and  philosophy  together  and  yet  finds 
an  element  of  radical  contradiction  in  our  experience ;    and 
tliat,  for   example,  the   very  contradiction   between   life   and 
philosophy,  between  life  and  thought,  has  to  be  reckoned  with 
at  the  outset.     "  Why,"  he  virtually  asks,  "  should  we  be  com- 
pelled to  think  that  we  can  solve  life  in  our  thoughts  when  we 
cannot  solve  it  ? "     And  what  is  the  good  of  thought,  when 
life  is  explained  to  more  than  three-fourths  of  its  extent  by 
physical  or  practical  necessity  ?     We  cannot,  it  seems,  limit 
philosophy   to   the   study   merely   of   that   of  which   we  are 
directly  conscious,  for  the  object  of  philosophy  is  "  the  world 
itself  in  its  entirety,  without  excepting  anything."     In  short, 
to  Schopenhauer,  philosophy  rests  on  the  fact  of  there  being 
mystery  or  contradiction  or  illusion  in  things,  and  to  him,  as 


436  Schopenhauer's  system. 

to  riato  and  Aristotle,  no  one  who  is  unmoved  by  a  sense 
of  wonder  or  illusion  is  a  fit  subject  for  philosophy.     "  Phil- 
osophy, like  the  overture  to  '  Don  Juan,'  begins  with  a  minor 
chord."     He   elsewhere   says   that   philosophy   looks  at   first 
sight  like  a  monster  having  many  heads,  and  each  talking 
a  diflerent  language.     One  is  entitled  to  call  Schopenhauer's 
philosophy  pessimistic  because  it  seems  to  find  the  illusionisni 
in  things  and  in  thought  to  be  permanent.     Even  the  escape 
which  he  suggests  from  life  can  never  be  an  escape  for  all  liv- 
ing beings ;  it  is  itself  only  a  last  great  illusion  completing  the 
series  of  illusions  which  constitute  life.     "  The  philosophical 
astonishment  is  therefore  at  bottom  perplexed  and  melancholy." 
It  is  possible  to  show  how  the  illusionism  incident  to  any 
one    part    of   Schopenhauer's    system    naturally   leads,  either 
directly  or   indirectly,  into   the   illusionism  incident  to  any 
other  part.     The  illusionism  of  the  system,  as  has  been  indi- 
cated, is  all-permeating  and  universal.     Take  the  illusionism 
in  his  ethics,  for  instance,  the  antithesis  between  egoism  and 
altruism,  or  the  antithesis  between  the  reasonable  will  which 
affirms  the  Ideas  and  the  wayward  will  which  affirms  personal 
advantage.       To    see    the    connection    between    this    ethical 
illusionism  and  the  illusionism  of  epistemology,  or  the  theory 
of  knowledge,  we  need  only  think  of  Schopenhauer's  reason 
for  his  assertion  that  the  difference  between  myself  and  other 
selves  is  unreal  and  imaginary.     This  is,  that  knowledge  or 
our  intellect  causes  us  to  split  up  the  world  into  a  congeries 
of  separate  and  individual  things  in  space  and  time,  while  in 
reality  the  world  is  not  a  congerios  but  one  thing,  one  organic 
effort  or  assertion  of  will.     The  generalised  statement  of  this 
epistemological  illusionism  is  again  the  metaphysical  illusion- 
ism— namely,  that  if  knowledge  falsifies  things,  it  follows  that 
what  appears  is  different  from  what  is.     Now  the  distinction 
between  the  apparent  and  the  real  becomes  the  problem  of 
ontology,    and  we    can    pass    from    Schopenhauer's   ontology 


THE   METAPHYSIC  OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  437 

either  to  his  ethics  or  to  his  {esthetics.  We  mny  go  back  to 
ethics  by  following  out  his  ))ractice  of  resolving  ontology  into 
teleology  (the  in([uiry  about  what  is  into  the  inquiry  about 
what  is  becoming).  And  teleology  is  a  question  of  the  will. 
Or  we  may  go  back  into  art  by  saying  that,  proj)erly  speaking, 
the  individual  things  and  beings  in  the  world  do  not  exist, 
but  only  tlie  species  or  the  Ideas  of  the  different  species,  and 
that  of  course  the  reproduction  or  the  vision  of  the  Ideas  is  an 
affair  of  art. 

From  ethics  one  can  easily,  as  has  been  seen,  pass  into 
religion  through  the  idea  that  man's  evil  will  or  evil  self 
always  stands  in  the  way  of  the  realisation  of  the  moral  idea 
of  pure  disinterestedness  or  pure  altruism,  lleligion,  that  is, 
gives  us  the  philosophy  of  the  evil  will  and  thus  of  the  non- 
attainment  by  man  of  the  ethical  ideal — gives  us,  in  short,  the 
metaphysic  of  ethics.  It  insists  that  all  the  illusoriness  of 
the  world  is  to  be  traced  to  the  fact  that  man  will  conliaae  to 
prefer  his  own  personal  happiness  and  interest  to  the  attain- 
ment of  the  rational  purpose  that  is  partly  apparent  in  the 
system  of  things.  It  insists,  to  put  it  otherwise,  that  we 
must  learn  to  accept  the  workings  and  purposes  of  the  will  of 
the  universe  in  preference  to  the  desires  of  our  own  will. 
Now  this  fact  of  our  being  born  to  submit  our  minds  and  our 
volitions  to  things  whether  we  like  it  or  not,  is  just  what  we 
at  an  earlier  stage  meant  by  the  Bondage  of  Man ;  ^  man  is 
born  to  submit  his  intellect  and  his  choice  to  the  demands  of 
his  practical  nature  and  of  the  needs  of  his  personality,  or 
rather  to  the  world -will  which  wills  the  evolution  of  life 
above  everything  else.^  We  are  not  born,  it  might  be  said, 
merely  to  contemplate  beauty  and  goodness  as  such.  Even 
these  things  to  a  certain  extent  represent  devices  on  the  part  of 

^  Chap.  iv. 

-  Cf.  "But  the  ultimate  aim  of  it  all  [the  'eiulless  strife'  and  'tumult'  of  the 
will],  what  is  it  ?  To  sustain  ephemeral  and  tormented  individuals  through  a 
short  span  of  time,"  &c. — Werke,  iii.  407  ;  H.  and  K.,  iii.  115. 


438  Schopenhauer's  system. 

the  world-will  to  make  us  will  the  evolution  of  life  in  general 
as  something  greater  than  our  own  mere  personal  life.  There 
is  a  great  difference,  of  course,  between  the  involuntary  and 
constrained  and  restricting  subjection  to  the  necessities  of  our 
practical  nature  and  the  voluntary  snbmission  of  religion  whicli 
means  the  attainment  of  freedom  ;  but  it  is  nevertheless  true  in 
general  that  the  explanation  of  life  is  to  be  found  in  a  complete 
submission  on  our  part  to  the  necessity  that  is  in  things.^ 

Open  Schopenhaner  wliere  one  will,  one  always  finds  him 
considering  some  particular  illusion  or  other  which  is  bred  of 
the  notion  that  the  individual  man  exists  in  order  to  seek  his 
own  mere  happiness.  Any  particular  illusion,  f,s  it  were,  is 
only  a  part  of  the  general  illusionism  of  the  system.  The 
whole  of  life  is  to  him  a  constant  effort  to  effect  an  equilibrium 
between  opposed  and  opposing  forces.  Walking,  he  reminds 
us,  is  only  a  continually  prevented  falling.  The  moral  life  is 
a  continual  struggle  between  selfishness  and  unselfishness  ;  and 
life  as  a  whole  is  a  struggle  between  the  ideas  that  we  are  apt 
to  form  about  life  and  the  fact  of  life  itself.  "A  man's  know- 
ledge may  be  said  to  be  mature  ;  in  other  words,  it  has  reached 
the  most  complete  state  of  perfection  to  which  he,  as  an  i  - 
vidual,  is  capable  of  bringing  it,  when  an  exact  correspondence 
is  established  between  the  whole  of  his  abstract  ideas  and  the 
things  he  has  actually  perceived  for  himself.  .  .  .  Maturity 
is  the  work  of  experience  alone,  and  therefore  it  requires  time." 

Upon  reflection  we  feel  that  it  is  just  the  contradiction 
between  what  may  be  called  Platonism  and  the  fact  of  life 
itself  that  determines  the  problem  of  Schopenhauer's  meta- 
physic.^  He  is  always  trying  to  correlate  idealism  and  nat- 
uralism or  naturalistic  evolution.     Kant's  philosophy  is  for  him 

*  "  Willing  I  follow  ;  were  it  not  my  will 
A  baffled  rebel  I  must  follow  still." 

-  This  is  why  the  theory  of  art  becomes  such  an  integral  part  of  his  system. 
Cf.  chaps.  V.  and  vi. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  439 

only  a  go-between  in  relation  to  these  two  views  of  the  world. 
His  problem  is  thus,  so  to  speak,  the  eternal  problem  of  the 
philopopher.  The  chief  function  of  the  philosopher,  the  func- 
tion that  the  world  is  always  willing  to  concede  to  him,  is  to 
show  by  some  manipulation  or  other  of  the  problems  of  know- 
ledge, how  the  Ideas  of  art  and  the  things  of  the  spirit  may 
possibly  be  real  in  view  of  all  the  stern  realism  of  the  mere 
brute  struggle  for  existence  to  which  we  are  all  subjected. 
How  can  we  find  the  self  in  the  higher  realities  of  art  and 
ethics  and  religion,  when  life  is  to  at  least  three-fourths  of  its 
extent  struggle  and  unrest  ?  Schopenhauer  practically  insists 
that  we  cannot  do  this  since  there  is  a  radical  difference 
between  the  world  as  will  and  the  world  as  idea,  and  since 
Ufe  is  ultimately  will  and  unconscious  tendency  and  uncon- 
scious force  and  instinct.  Neither  life  nor  the  idea  seems  to 
bring  us  what  it  promises.  Life  does  not  bring  us  cUtain- 
ment,  but  only  a  blind  attaining  or  effort  to  attain.  The 
idea  or  the  intellect  does  not  give  us  absolute  knowledge, 
bat  only  phenomenal  and  relative  knowledge, — knowledge  of 
tlie  connections  among  things  and  not  of  things  themselves. 
It  is  hard  to  suppress  one's  tendency  to  cut  Schopenhauer's 
whole  knot  by  simply  saying  that  there  is  no  opposition  at 
all  between  the  will  and  the  idea.  There  is  no  such  tiling, 
in  fact,  as  the  mere  idea  or  as  absolute  knowledge,  and  also 
no  such  thing  as  mere  will  or  unconscious  force.  But  then 
])hilosophy  has  not  yet  abandoned  the  idea  that  we  may, 
despite  apparent  dilficultics,  attain  to  absolute  knowledge ;  or, 
at  least,  there  are  still  some  philosophers  who  continue  to  seek 
kuowledie  as  an  end  in  itself.  And  so  it  is  natural  to  find 
the  system  of  Schopenhauer  following  that  of  Hegel,  and 
suggesting  to  men  that  in  the  mere  idea  there  is  no  com- 
plete solution  of  things.  The  philosophy  of  the  will  was  the 
Nemesis  which  overtook  the  philosophy  of  the  absolute  idea. 
Even,  too,  if  we  look  at  life  as  a  struggle-  between  the  idea 


440  Schopenhauer's  system. 

and  the  will,  there  is  no  solution  of  life.  Life  is  rather  a 
process  of  development  in  which  what  is  attained  is  always 
something  more  than  what  mere  knowledge  could  have  enabled 
us  to  foresee.  We  can  use  our  knowledge  only  to  understand 
the  great  fact  of  life  itself,  and  to  make  us  conscious,  to  a 
certain  extent,  of  the  ends  which  the  universe  or  its  author 
has  designed  for  us.  The  predominating  idea  in  Schopen- 
hauer's philosophy  is  that  all  life  is  a  manifestation  of  what 
is  first  a  matter  of  unconsciousness  for  us,  something  that 
we  only  imperfectly  know  and  only  progressively  and  imper- 
fectly apprehend.  That  it  is  such,  however,  is  nothing  at 
which  we  should  be  shocked  or  pained,  if  we  have  got  rid  of 
the  idea  that  we  have  any  right  to  frame  expectations  about 
life  before  knowing  the  facts  of  life. 

II.  The  outlines  of  Schopenhauer's  cosmic  philosophy  have 
already  been  indicated.  The  first  assertion,  to  use  his  own 
language,  of  the  will  is  the  Platonic  Ideas,  the  Ideas  of  the 
various  forms  that  the  cosmic  force  tends  to  take,  and  of  the 
different  species  of  beings  that  such  forms  or  modes  of  the 
cosmic  force  tend  to  create.  The  natural  world  to  him  is  like 
a  musical  theme  with  variations,  a  kind  of  fugue,  as  it  were,  in 
which  the  central  idea  always  tends  to  elude  us  and  is  caught 
and  apprehended  by  us  only  from  time  to  time,  or  only  in  its 
most  general  features.  The  Ideas  represent  the  central  mean- 
ing of  the  world  io  Schopenhauer.  They  are  confusedly 
apprehended  by  the  majority  of  men,  but  with  relatively 
perfect  clearness  and  comprehension  by  the  artist  and  the  man 
of  genius.  The  separating  and  discriminating  intellect  which 
happens  to  have  made  its  appearance  in  the  case  of  "  man's 
brain,"  makes  man,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  think  that  the 
various  assertions  and  creations  of  the  world- will  are  different 
and  distinct  from  each  other,  whereas  in  reality  they  are  not 
so.    Id  the  case  of  man  the  intellect  causes  him  to  distinguish 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  441 

between  himself  and  his  motives,  even  although  it  is  perfectly 
clear  that  the  motives  are  incipient  tendencies  to  action, 
nascent  actions  in  fact,  and  that  the  man  is  just  his  motives 
or  the  tendencies  to  action  that  exhibit  themselves  in  him. 
The  understanding,  Schopenhauer  holds,  can  never  see  things 
except  as  disjoined  and  separated  from  one  another ;  its  view 
of  things  is  consequently  always  partial  and  never  complete. 
Instead,  however,  of  encouraging  us  to  go  on  with  our  intellect 
to  seek  an  intelligible  reason  for  things,  an  intellectual  basis  for 
reality,  Schopenhauer  would  have  us  abandon  altogether  the 
attempt  to  give  an  intellectual  explanation  of  the  world.  Any 
intellectual  explanation  of  the  world  must  always  in  his  view 
be  an  "external"^  or  artificial  one,  because  it  must  always  cause 
us  to  separate  things  from  each  other  and  from  the  self,  and  so 
make  reality  appear  to  be  something  outside  ourselves,  which 
we  have  to  assume,  and  the  real  essence  and  genesis  of  which 
we  can  never  understand,  seeing  that  wu  do  not  ourselves  make 
it.  He  makes  us  turn  from  the  tvithout  to  the  within,  from  the 
merely  intellectual  aspects  of  things  to  their  volitional  aspects. 
In  the  will,  he  teaches,  we  apprehend  the  life  of  the  whole 
world,  since  that  life  is  the  same  everywhere  as  in  ourselves. 
But  just  as  Schopenhauer's  principle  of  will  came  to  him  as  a 
discovery,  by  way  of  reaction  from  the  vain  endeavours  after 
an  intellectual  explanation  of  the  world  (in  Fichte  or  in  Schel- 
liiig,  or  in  himself  as  a  beginner  in  philosophy),  so  he  always 
seemed  to  think  of  will  as  an  irrational  thing,  as  a  breaking 
away  from  the  timeless  peace  of  perfect  contemplation,  or  the 
timeless  peace  of  the  mind  that  contemplates  the  Ideas.  His 
principle  of  will  would  have  been  nearer  to  ordinary  life, 
nearer  the  truth  of  the  actual  world  as  we  know  it,  if  it  had 
not  been  put  forward  as,  in  the  first  instance,  unconscious 
and  irrational.  We  know  that  it  seemed  to  be  so  only  for 
the  reason  just  stated. 

»  Of.  p.  396. 


442  schopenhauee's  system. 

The  root  idea  in  Schopenhauer's  metaphysic  is,  that  the  will 
is  something  essentially  different  from  what  it  seems  to  be — 
something,  in  fact,  that  cannot  be  known  but  only  experienced. 
This  was  Schopenhauer's  own  impression  and  feeling  about 
reality ;  and  it  was  the  idea  which  he  tried  co  unfold  with 
more  or  less  success  in  his  system.  The  undertone  of  all  that 
he  writes  upon  human  life  and  human  character  and  human 
institutions  and  manners  and  customs  and  things  generally, 
is  the  feeling  that  everything  is  essentially  illusory.  "  In 
(these)  later  years,  and  not  before,  a  man  comes  to  a  true 
appreciation  of  Horace's  maxim  :  Nil  admirari.  He  is  directly 
and  sincerely  convinced  of  the  vanity  of  everything,  and  that 
all  the  glories  of  the  world  are  as  nothing :  his  illusions  are 
gone.  He  is  no  more  beset  with  the  idea  that  there  is  any 
particular  amount  of  happiness  anywhere,  in  the  palace  or 
in  the  cottage,  any  more  than  he  himself  enjoys  when  he  is 
free  from  bodily  or  mental  pain.  The  worldly  distinctions  of 
great  and  small,  high  and  low,  exist  foi'  him  no  longer ;  and  in 
this  blissful  state  of  mind  the  old  man  may  looic  down  with  a 
smile  upon  all  false  notions.  He  is  completely  undeceived, 
and  knows  that  whatever  may  be  done  to  adorn  human  life 
and  deck  it  out  in  finery,  its  paltry  character  will  .'oon  show 
through  the  glitter  of  its  surroundings ;  and  that,  paint  and 
bejewel  it  as  one  may,  it  remains  everywhere  much  th-^  same, 
— an  existence  which  has  no  true  value  except  in  freedom  from 
pain,  and  is  never  to  be  estimated  by  the  presence  of  pleasure, 
let  alone,  then,  of  display."  ^ 

It  must  be  confessei'  that  the  feeling  that  there  is  much 
illusion  in  the  world  is  not  one  that  can  be  very  easily  passed 
over.  A  feeling  or  impression  such  as  this,  when  it  is  at  all 
deeply  rooted, — as  this  of  Schopenhauer's  seems  on  the  whole 
to  be, — must  have  arisen  from  some  permanent  effect  that  the 
world  or  experience  itself  has  had  upon  the  will  and  disposition. 
^  Werke,  v.  !/26  ;  B.  S.,  Counsels  and  Maxims,  pp.  154,  155. 


THE   METAPHYSIO   OP  SCHOPENHAUER.  443 

And  indeed  if  all  reality  is  just  that  which  affects  the  will,  the 
fact  cannot  be  overlooked  that  the  will  is  hemmed  in  and  re- 
pressed at  a  thousand  points  and  in  a  thousand  ways  by  the 
rude  shocks  of  time  and  circumstance.  "  When  I  have  nothing 
to  trouble  me,  even  this  very  fact  that  nothing  troubles  me  is  a 
source  of  annoyance  to  me,  as  if  there  really  ought  to  be  some- 
thing to  trouble  me,  which  I  cannot  just  at  the  present  see. 
Misera  conditio  nostra."  ^  The  fault,  of  course,  may  be  in  the 
will  itself  of  the  individual  man,  but  that  does  not  destroy  the 
fact  that,  taking  the  world  and  life  as  a  whole,  there  is  a  vast 
amount  of  illusion  in  it.  Most  of  what  Schopenhauer  writes 
upon  the  actions  and  sayings  of  man  reveals  a  fundamental 
distrust  upon  his  part  towards  these  actions  and  sayings — a 
feeling  that  they  are  nothing  or  their  own  account,  but  rather 
only  indications  of  the  great  extent  to  which  man  is  submitted 
in  life  to  the  necessities  of  physical  and  unconscious  nature. 
He  always  seems,  as  it  were,  to  be  pressing  his  way  beyond 
the  convention  and  the  ignorance  that  are  displayed  in  ordinary 
life  and  conversation.  He  has  no  feeling  ot  complacency  or 
politeness  or  kindness  towards  men  and  towards  the  number- 
less conventions  of  life  and  society.  His  attitude  towards  the 
doings  and  sayings  of  ordinary  men  is  like  that  of  the  trained 
physician  or  lawyer  examining  a  patient  or  witness,  only  inter- 
ested in  the  sayings  of  that  person  so  far  as  they  help  him  to 
get  beyond  them  to  something  that  is  deeper  and  more  funda- 
mental. "Tlio  doctor  sees  mankind  in  all  its  weakness,  the 
lawyer  in  all  its  wickedness,  and  the  theologian  in  all  its 
stupidity."  ^  Eeduce  all  experience  to  its  simplest  form — this 
is  Schopenhauer's  feeling — and  you  will  find  that  it  is  the 
vnll  or  the  effort  to  be  and  to  attain.  Just  as  in  his  cosmic 
philosophy  he  breaks  down  all  physical  entities  and  forces  into 
one  great  cosmic  will,  so  he  reduces  almost  all  of  the  conscious 

'  Schop.,  Cogitata. 

^  Schop. ,  Werke,  vi.  639  ;  Psychologische  Bemerkungen. 


444  Schopenhauer's  system. 

phenomena  of  the  human  mind  into  terms  of  the  unconscious 
impulses  and  desires,  and  thus  makes  the  individual  will  simply 
the  fact  of  more  life  rather  than  the  numberless  particular 
objects  which  he  may  by  his  words  and  professions  claim  to  be 
pursuing.  It  is  in  a  sense  true,  of  course,  that  it  is  the 
unconscious  actions  and  tendencies  of  men  that  we  ought  to 
study  if  we  are  seeking  to  know  their  real  character.^  We 
may  indeed  use  our  consciousness  to  enable  us  to  interpret 
so-called  unconscious  phenomena  (as  when  we  attribute  emo- 
tions to  the  lower  animals),  but  then  our  consciousness  itself 
is  only  so  much  of  the  unconscious  depths  of  our  nature  as 
has  risen  above  the  "  surface"  or  the  "  threshold"  which  marks 
this  very  transition  from  the  conscious  to  the  unconscious. 
Now  what  we  find  out  about  the  unconscious,  our  conscious 
interpretation  of  the  unconscious,  is  true  enough  and  real 
enough  as  far  as  it  goes,  but  it  does  not  go  very  far.  Scho- 
penhauer was  wrong  in  thinking  that  the  unconscious  was 
necessarily  quite  different  from  the  conscious,  that  what  is 
underneath  the  surface  in  human  actions  is  very  different 
from  the  words  and  expressions  and  aims  that  are  found 
upon  the  surface.  But  he  was  justified  in  feeling  that  the 
deepest  meaning  of  life  is  to  be  found  somehow  beyond  the 
impressions  and  ideas  that  the  average  individual  has  about 
himself. 

At  the  head  of  this  chapter  we  have  quoted  an  expression 
indicating  Schopenhauer's  belief  t^at  philosophy  has  made 
altogether  a  wrong  use  of  the  human  intellect,  in  the  con- 
struction that  it  has  tried  to  put  upon  things.  Philosophy 
has  often  tried  to  state  definitely  and  directly  what  the  workl 
means  for  thought  alo7ic.  Now  Schopenhauer  stands  for  the 
fact  that  there  is  no  such  view  of  the  world,  and  that  the  very 
use  of  the  intellect  for  this  purpose  reveals  a  fundamental  mis- 
conception of  what  the  intellect  or  consciousness  properly  is. 

^  Cf.  supra,  p.  344. 


THE   METAPHYSIC  OP   SCHOPENHAUER.  445 

It  is  more  correct  for  philosophy  to  ask  what  the  world  i» 
manifestly  trying  to  Iring  abaiU  or  attain  to,  than  what  the 
world  as  a  matter  of  fact  is  for  our  thought  at  any  one  moment. 
Philosophers  have  too  often  forgotten  the  fact  that  Socrates, 
whose  glory  it  was  to  have  found  out  the  conception  and  its 
value  for  knowledge  and  philosophy,  was  really  in  the  ques- 
tions that  he  asked  of  men  a  most  tantalisingly  practical  and 
utilitarian  ^  kind  of  person,  always  asking  the  question  irpog  ri, 
the  practical  or  relative  good  of  a  thing,  its  use  or  purpose ; 
and  also  that  Socrates  is  praised  by  Aristotle,  in  a  memorable 
passage,'  as  the  father  of  inductive  reasoning,  because  he 
differed  from  other  philosophers  in  not  separating  (ra  KaOoXov 
oil  x^pttTTa  liToUi)  the  "  universal "  from  particular  instances. 
Socrates,  in  fact,  never  studied  the  conception  or  the  idea  apart 
from  the  notion  of  purpose  or  utility  or  design,  and  never 
studied  design  or  purpose  apart  from  the  various  examples 
that  he  and  other  men  had  before  their  eyes  of  this  very  thing. 
And  so  Schopenhauer's  professed  feeling,  that  nothing  had 
been  done  in  philosophy  from  the  time  of  Socrates  until  the 
time  of  Kant,  is  far  from  being  utterly  ungrounded.  It  is 
largely  true  that  people  studied  the  conception  for  more  than  a 
thousand  years  after  Socrates,  without  ever  being  clear  in  their 
minds  as  to  what  the  conception  really  was,  and  whether  it 
expressed  any  definite  element  of  reality.  Indeed,  as  Scho- 
penhauer often  says,  nothing  was  done  in  philosophy  with  the 
conception  until  Kant  came  and  criticised  the  dogmatic  or 
ontological  use  of  the  conception,  and  substituted  therefor 
the  regulative  or  the  practical  use  of  the  same,  its  utility  in 


'  We  cannot  be  too  grateful  to  the  World-spirit  for  having  given  us  Xenophon 
as  well  as  Plato  to  portray  the  personality  of  Socrates.  Knowing  how  refreshing 
a  touch  of  reality  is  after  an  excess  of  transcendentalism,  one  might  almost  give  a 
turn  to  the  words  of  Jacobi  about  Spinoza,  and  say,  "  Ofier  with  me  a  lock  of  hair 
to  the  pious  Xenophon." 

"  Sio  ydp  4ariv  S.  ris  hv  iiroiolri  ^uKpdrtt  SiKalws,  rois  r'  iiraKTtKohs  K6yovs  Kal 
rh  ipl(((Teai.  koWAou.— Meta.j  1078  b,  27-9. 


446  Schopenhauer's  system. 

enabling  us  to  co-ordinate  our  experience.^  Whatever  some 
of  the  ultimate  consequences  of  the  Critical  Philosophy  may 
be,  its  idea  that  most  of  the  conceptions  of  the  human  mind 
— most  of  our  knowledge  of  reality — have,  after  all,  only  a 
practical  or  regulative  value,  represents  one  of  the  greatest 
contributions  of  speculative  philosophy  to  the  thought  and  life 
of  humanity.  •  Indeed,  the  criterion  of  all  the  conceptions  of 
science  and  philosophy  is  their  practical  value,  their  power  of 
enabling  us  to  set  forth  more  or  less  completely  the  relation 
that  exists  between  the  human  will  (the  actions  of  men)  and 
the  cosmic  will  that  is  the  support  of  the  whole  universe. 

All  the  leading  ideas  of  science  and  philosophy  can  be 
arranged  more  perfectly  in  a  teleological  and  practical  way 
than  in  an  ontological  and  dogmatical  way.  Schopenhauer  felt 
this,  and  was  consequently  right  in  feeling  that  much  post- 
Kantian  philosophy  was  a  departure  from  Kant's  true  mean- 
ing, and  that  we  had  still  to  grasp  the  meaning  of  Kant's  atti- 
tude towards  the  world  that  we  know  with  our  senses.  The 
bold  antithetical  character  of  his  own  first  principle  of  will,  in 
contradistinction  to  the  philosophy  of  the  idea,  and  the  em- 
phatic (if  not  complete)  development  that  he  gave  to  this 
principle,  constitute  him  perhaps  the  only  dogmatic  philosopher 
of  modern  ^  times,  whose  system  will  last  with  humanity  itself ; 
just  as  Kant,  in  spite  of  the  many  remnants  of  dogmatic  philo- 
sophy which  hang  round  his  system,  is  the  only  critical 
philosopher  of  modern  times.  On  a  broad  view  of  matters, 
the   assertion   that   the  world  is  will  is   much   more   nearly 

^  "  And  did  scholasticism  make  no  use  of  the  conception  ? "  some  one  may  ask. 
"  No  !  "  says  Schopenhauer — "  no  real  use,  because  it  used  the  conception  out  of 
relation  to  the  will ;  it  applied  the  intellect  to  something  for  which  it  was  not  at 
all  intended." — Cf.  the  first  quotation  under  the  title  of  this  chapter. 

- 1  confess  to  feelings  of  reservation  even  as  I  write  this.  My  meaning  is  that 
if  one  were  compelled  (in  contravention  of  the  general  sobriety  of  true  criticism) 
to  affirm  some  one  thing  about  the  world,  one  might  have  less  objection  to  calliug 
the  world  will  than  to  calling  it  something  else.  (Will-at  least  connotes  evolution 
and  suggests  purpose.) 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  447 

true  tliau  some  other  assertions  which  have  been  made  by 
philosophers,  such  as  tliat  the  world  is  substance,  or  that  it 
consists  of  atoms  or  ultimate  chemical  or  physical  elements. 
Kant  almost  said  the  last  word  that  ever  can  be  said  about 
knowledge  as  such  and  its  limits,  and  Schopenhauer  has  at  least 
suggested  a  path  along  which  the  reality  of  the  world  as  a 
whole  can  best  be  understood.  Hegel  is  certainly  not  the  most 
characteristic  modern  philosopher,  not  the  philosopher  whose 
results  are  most  nearly  true  about  reality,  for  this  simple 
reason,  if  for  no  other,  that  he  created  an  impression  in  the 
minds  of  his  followers  that  the  ultimate  meaning  of  reality  is 
to  be  found  in  thought}  Kant  may  be  said  to  have  broken 
down  ontological  philosophy  from  the  standpoint  of  the  in- 
tellect, and  Schopenhauer  to  have  broken  down  the  same  thing 
from  the  standpoint  of  the  will.  There  are  no  static  elements 
in  reality  if  everything  is  will.  The  striking  thing  is  that  the 
work  of  both  philosophers  to  a  certain  extent  coincides,  in  so 
far  as  Kant's  philosophy  affords  us  an  illustration  of  the  truth 
that  the  problems  of  intellectual  philosophy  are  best  under- 
stood when  a  practical  construction  is  put  upon  them,  and  as 
Schopenhauer's  philosophy  renders  us  the  same  service  in  regard 
to  the  problems  of  ontology  or  teleology.  The  concept,  in  short, 
does  not  enable  us  to  say  what  reality  is,  but  only  what  our 
relation  is  to  the  system  of  things  of  which  we  form  a  part ; 
and  in  the  same  way  matter,  or  the  physical  universe,  may  be 
said  to  be  nothing  that  is  absolutely  real  on  its  own  account, 
but  rather  only  a  manifestation  of  a  gigantic  cosmic  force 
which  is  at  bottom  identical  with  the  force  that  we  feel  in 
ourselves  impelling  us  to  act  and  to  evolve. 

^  It  is  possibly  permissible  to  avow  that  one  gets  one's  self  this  impression  from 
reading  Hegel.  Out  of  numberless  statements  about  Hegel's  philosophy  in  this 
regard,  the  following  may  be  selected  from  Professor  A.  Seth's  '  Kant  to  Hegel ' 
(from  a  page  representing  a  deliberate  and  judicious  summary  estimate  of  Hegel) : 
"Thought  iiself  becomes  the  object  of  philosophy,  and  the  search  for  something 
'real'  beyond  and  apart  from  thought  is  definitely  abandoned"  (p.  146). 


448  Schopenhauer's  system. 

The  illusionism  which  characterises  Schopenhauer's  meta- 
physic  is  thus  partly  the  inevitable  disappointment  of  the 
philosopher  who  expects  to  solve  definitely  and  dogmatically 
the  problem  as  to  what  the  world  is.  The  system  of  will 
bears  standing  testimony  to  the  fact  that  thought  is  not  equal 
to  setting  forth  the  composite  nature  of  the  world.  Schopen- 
hauer himself  owed  the  intellectual  disappointment  in  question 
to  the  fact  that  in  his  youth  he  was  greatly  influenced  by  the 
ideal  which  rational  philosophers  had  set  themselves.  He 
ought  to  have  confessed  at  the  end  of  his  system  that  much 
of  the  illusionism  that  he  had  taught  or  discovered  about  our 
experience  was  imaginary  and  gratuitous,  as  having  arisen,  in 
fact,  from  certain  false  ideas  in  the  minds  of  philosophers 
about  reality.  He  did  not  do  this,  and  even  if  he  had  done 
so,  it  would  not  have  removed  all  the  atmosphere  of  disen- 
chantment and  illusion  from  his  system.  There  is,  as  has 
been  stated,  another  phase  of  illusionism  in  Schopenhauer's 
system  which  is  due  to  his  mistaken  acceptance  of  the  philo- 
sophy of  idealism.  Idealism  begins  by  questioning  the  reality 
of  the  world  revealed  to  us  by  our  senses,  and  having  done 
this  it  is  on  the  road  to  question  the  reality  of  all  reality,^ 
the  reality  of  everything  that  professes  or  appears  to  be  real. 
Schopenhauer  shows  in  his  system  this  tendency  of  the  mind 
that  has  imbibed  something  of  the  temper  of  idealism  to 
question  one  plane  of  experience  after  another.  "  Politeness," 
for  example,  he  says,  is  the  "  mask  to  egoism,"  (He  could  not 
think  of  such  a  thing  as  "  heart-politeness  "  or  the  politeness 
arising  from  natural  grace  of  manner.) 

Now  it  is  possible  to  have  an  idealistic  temperament  and  an 
idealistic  attitude  of  mind  towards  reality  in  excess.  We 
remember  how  Eobert  Browning,  in  his  *  Bishop  Blougram,' 
hits  off  the  danger  of  letting  go  our  hold  on  the  reality  that 
is  before  us,  under  the  imaginary  idea  that  we  may  somehow 

1  Cf.  mpra,  pp.  84,  275. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OP   SCHOPENHAUER.  449 

encounter  a  greater  reality  than  the  present.  He  compares 
this  to  the  action  of  a  man  who  discards  warm  clothing  in 
Russia  because  he  is  going  to  Franco  where  it  will  bo  needless, 
and  light  clothing  in  Spain  because  he  is  going  to  Africa 
where  one  needs  hardly  any  clothing  at  all.  And  so  it  is  in 
Schopenhauer.  "  The  scenes  of  our  life  are  like  pictures  done 
in  rough  mosaic.  Looked  at  close,  they  produce  no  effect. 
There  is  nothing  beautiful  to  be  found  in  them  unless  you 
stand  some  distance  off.  So  to  gain  anything  we  have  longed 
for  is  only  to  discover  how  vain  and  empty  it  is ;  and  even 
though  we  are  always  living  in  expectation  of  better  things, 
at  the  same  time  we  often  repent  and  long  to  have  the  past 
back  again.  We  look  upon  the  present  as  something  to  be 
put  up  with  while  it  lasts,  and  serving  only  as  the  way 
towards  the  goal.  Hence  most  people,  if  they  glance  back 
when  they  come  to  the  end  of  life,  will  find  that  they  have 
all  along  been  living  ad  interim :  they  will  be  surprised  to 
find  that  the  very  thing  they  disregarded  and  let  slip  by 
unenjoyed  was  just  the  life  in  the  expectation  of  which  they 
passed  all  their  time.  Of  how  many  men  may  it  not  be  said 
that  hope  made  a  fool  of  him  until  he  danced  into  the  arms  of 
death  !''i 

In  philosophy  one  must  never  let  go  one's  hold  upon 
reality,  but  grapple  with  it  resolutely — like  the  capturers  of 
Proteus  in  the  '  Odyssey ' — through  all  the  changing  phases 
of  its  manifestation  of  itself.  It  is  very  dangerous  to  think 
of  brushing  aside  the  surface  of  things,  the  phase  of  reality 
that  is  revealed  to  us  by  our  senses,  with  the  idea  of  getting 
beneath  to  some  imaginary  hidden  reality.  Having  ques- 
tioned the  "  surface  "  of  things,  one  will  be  apt  to  question 
also  the  "  hidden  reality "  that  is  beneath,  because  we  have 
removed  the  surface  in  relation  to  which  alone  that  supposed 

^  Schop.,  Werke,  vi.  305  ;  zur  Lehre  vou  der  Nichtigkeit  des  Daseyns.     B.  S., 
Studies  in  Pessismism,  pp.  36,  37. 

2  F 


450  Schopenhauer's  system. 

reality  can  be  understood.     All  things  exist  in  relation,  as 
it  were ;  and  yet  Schopenhauer  always  seems  to  be  passing 
away  from  one  plane  of  reality  to  another,  under  the  idea 
that  he  will  thus   somehow  encounter   more   real  reality  or 
a  greater  amount  of  reality.     It  has  been  suggested  how  easy 
it  is  to  get  from  any  one  point  in  Schopenhauer's  philosophy 
to  any  other  point.     Indeed  he  prides  himself  on  that  very 
feature  of  his   system.      But  it  is   not   only   easy   to  make 
transitions  in  his  philosophy — it  is  too  fatally  easy.     Scho- 
penhauer was  himself  driven  from  one  plane   to  another  in 
bis  search  after  reality,  because  he  could  not  definitely  make 
up  his  mind  about  the  reality  or  the  relative  reality  of  any 
one  thing.      It  is  not  implied   in  this  that  we  can  say  what 
any  one    thing   or   any  one    plane   of  reality   is,  in  and  for 
itself ;    but  only  that  at  least   relative   justice    ought   to   be 
done  to   one   thing   before    passing    on    to    another — to  the 
phenomena    of    the    senses,   for    example,  before  passing  on 
to  the  phenomena  of  thought  or  the  phenomena  of  volition. 
Schopenhauer   is   always  shifting   about    from    one    plane  of 
reality  to  another,  and  so  his   whole   system  seems  to  be  a 
restless  and  futile  quest  after  reality.      We   remember  how 
inadequate  his  treatment  of  ethics  was,  in  so  far  as  he  gave 
no    sufficient    recognition    to    the    positive    facts    of    ethics.' 
Ethical  reality  eluded  him  because  he  did  not  have  a  real 
enough  hold   upon  the   ordinary   dtttics  of  life.     He   passed 
too  easily  from  ethics  into  religion,  just  because  the  contro- 
versial and  speculative  problems  in  ethics  blinded  his  eyes  to 
what  was  positive  and  real  in  morality.     No  doubt  experience 
seems  to  show  that  a  philosopher,  in  his  search  after  reality, 
is  very  apt  to  eat  the  heart  out  of  one  thing  after  another, 
and  to  seize  at  once  the  essence  of  a  thing  or  a  situation, 
and  to  be  always  passing  on  to  something  other  than  what 
he  has  immediately  before  him.     He  is   apt  to  bring  great 

'  Supra,  p.  330. 


THE    METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  451 

intellectual  pain  to  himself  in  this  very  way,  mainly  because 
he  has  never,  as  it  were,  the  satisfaction  of  exhausting  any 
one  side  of  reality,  of  doing  the  fullest  justice  to  any  one 
thing.     Schopenhauer  shows  this  intellectual  pain  and  rest- 
lessness.     He  rushes  from  philosophy  into  spiritualism,  from 
science  into  art,  from  art  to  religion,  and  in  religion  he  is  a 
sceptic  and  a  devotee  at  one  and  the  same  time.     The  philo- 
sopher, in  fact,  goes  on  feeling  his  way  towards  reality  from 
one  experience  to  another,  and  through  one  plane  of  reality 
to  another,  until    he   finds  that  in  this  very  process,  in  this 
very   transition,  the  deepest  meaning  of  reality  is  apparent. 
He    then    is    able    to    proclaim    somewhat    in   the  way  that 
Schopenhauer  does,  or  more  perfectly  perhaps  than  Schopeu- 
liauer  does,  the  fact  that  reality  is  simply  that  vjhich  endlessly 
transforms  itself,  and  that  a  will  to  evolve  and  to  attain  to 
higher  development  is  the  last  and  most  real  aspect  of  reality. 
There  is  still  another  reason  for  the  illusionism  that  exists 
in  Schopenhauer's  system.     His  illusionism  grows  in  a  manner 
out  of  the  very  difficulties  connected  with  the  philosophy  of 
will.     If  reality  is  will,  it  is  natural  for  us  to  seek  for  some 
last  stage  to  which  the  evolving  movement  that  is  in  things 
will  finally  conduct  us.      Eeality  must  be  evolving  in  some 
direction,  and  to  rome  end.     It  has  been  suggested  that  tlie 
direction  in  which  reality  is  evolving  may  be  found  in  the 
highest   purposes   and   volitions   of  conscious   human   beings. 
Now,  if  this  be  true,  everything  that  falls  short  of  the  highest 
reality  and  the  hignest  achievement  is  apt  to  seem  illusory. 
Schopenhauer  speaks  as  if  life  never  brought  to  us  anything 
else  than  the  mere  experience  of  life.     It  is  hard,  as  we  have 
seen,  to  say  just  wherein  the  reality  of  the  human  personality 
consists  according  to  him,  because  he  seems  to  make  sesthetic 
enjoyment  and  religious   contemplation — the  highest  experi- 
ences ov  the  highest  planes  of  reality  that  are  known  to  us — 
dependent   upon   the   complete   elimination  of  all  individual 


452  schoienhauer's  system. 

and  separate  existence.  And,  in  general,  he  clearly  teaches 
in  all  that  he  says  and  writes  that  most  of  the  strife  and 
struggle  of  human  beings  (in  so  far  as  it  ignores  the  fact  that 
the  education  of  the  will  of  man  and  the  eradication  of  the 
selfishness  of  the  personal  will  is  the  greatest  thing  in  the 
world  for  us)  is  ilhisory.  We  accomplish  nothing  in  the 
world,  so  to  speak,  until  we  see  the  vanity  of  most  of  the 
ordinary  pursuit"^  and  achievements  of  man.  This  is  mani- 
festly that  pessimism  of  the  preacher  and  the  theologian  to 
which  we  have  already  referred  as  a  part  of  Schopenhauer's 
system.  All  reality  seems  to  sum  itself  up  in  the  conscious 
person  and  in  the  possibility  of  his  spiritual  or  ideal  volition. 
It  is  only  there  (this  is  the  outcome  of  Schopenhauer)  that  we 
find  an  answer  to  the  first  problem  of  philosophy,  the  question 
about  the  nature  of  the  real  world.^  All  life  i  nd  all  existence 
which  falls  short  of  tlie  reality  of  the  idealised  aspiration  and 
volition  of  conscious  human  beings  is  illusory  in  the  eyes  of 
Schopenhauer,  even  though,  as  we  must  remember,  he  can 
make  the  individual  real  only  by  robbing  him  of  his  personal 
identity.  Now  we  are  prepared  to  regard  the  reality  of  all 
that  falls  short  of  the  reality  of  the  human  person  as  not 
absolute  but  relative.  If  the  individual,  then,  has  not  realised 
in  his  volition  the  idealities  of  which  art  and  ethics  and 
religion  all  speak,  he  will  find  that  nothing  else  in  the  system 
of  things  can  well  be  calculated  upon  to  take  their  place.  In 
the  absence  of  these  spiritual  possessions  he  will  have  nothing 
in  his  experience  which  he  can  intelligibly  think  to  be  real. 
And  so  the  whole  world  >yill  seem  to  him  to  be  illusory. 

III.  Into  the  idea  and  the  fact  of  volition  Schopen- 
hauer melts  everytl  ing  down  —  all  the  entities  of  science 
and  metaphysic,  and  all  the  doctrines  founded  upon  these 
entities.     The  first  thing  that  goes  is  the  general  idea  that 

1  Cf.  p.  99. 


THE    METAPHYSIC   OF    SCHOPENHAUER.  453 

philosophy  can  tell  us  about  that  which  lies  beyond  all  ex- 
perience and  reality.  And,  by  the  way,  the  disappearance 
of  this  notion  must  have  been  instructive  to  Schopenhauer 
himself.  "  By  metaphysic  I  understand  knowledge  that 
pretends  to  transcend  the  possibility  of  experience,  thus  to 
transcend  nature  or  the  given  phenomenal  appearance  of 
things,  in  order  to  give  an  explanation  of  that  by  which, 
in  some  sense  or  other,  this  experience  or  nature  is  con- 
ditioned ;  or,  to  speak  in  popular  language,  all  that  which 
is  behind  nature  and  makes  it  possible."  ^  Now  the  system 
teaches  that  this  is  wholly  wrong ;  we  cannot  get  beyond 
nature  or  experience.  We  cannot,  because,  to  begin  with, 
thought  is  only  a  part  of  e:vperience,  dependent  upon  the 
rest  of  experience  for  its  subject-matter.  We  can  think  only 
in  so  far  as  we  have  also  experienced,  and  we  can  have 
experience  only  in  so  far  as  we  take  up  in  our  lives  a 
direct  and  volitional  attitude  towards  reality.  Our  thouglit 
is  nothing  but  our  experience  of  life  and  of  our  action,  stated 
in  the  simplest  terms  possible.  Nature  has  given  us  the 
power  of  thought  so  that  we  may,  in  our  knowledge,  take 
cognisance  of  the  place  which  we  occupy  in  the  evolution  of 
the  life  of  the  universe.  And  then,  again,  we  can  have  no 
knowledge  of  anything  that  transcends  tlie  world,  for  the 
plain  reason  that  if  things  do  not,  somehow,  affect  our  will, 
we  can  have  no  consciousness  of  them  at  all.  Doubtless 
Schopenhauer  might  hold  that,  by  making  out  the  trans- 
cendental side  of  things  to  be  will,  he  gets  to  know  the 
transcendental  meaning  of  reality ;  but  his  philosophy  would 
have  been  still  more  intelligible  if  he  had  revised  his  definition 
of  metaphysic  and  had  said  that  there  is  no  transcendenta'  ^ 
knowledge  whatever  of  reality.     He  might  in  all  naturalness 

1  World  as  Will,  &c.;  Eng.  transl.,  H.  and  K.,  ii.  364. 

-  In  using  the  word  transcendental  here  I  use  it  in  its  current  popular  signifi- 
cation, and  not  in  the  precise  sensj  in  which  Kant  uses  it  and  some  of  those  who 
we  careful  to  follow  him  closely. 


454  Schopenhauer's  system. 

have  done  this,  seeing  that  will  is  manifestly  that  which  is 
most  visibly  revealed  to  us  in  everything  that  we  see  and 
apprehend  in  ordinary  life.  He  did  not  do  this,  however, 
because,  like  Fichte  and  Schelling,  he  allowed  himself  to  talk 
of  his  chief  principle  as  if  it  were  an  abstract  potency,  an 
imaginary  point  from  which  all  reality  could  be  evolved, 
instead  of  a  concrete  reality.  Philosophy  ought  to  insist 
that  it  knows  nothing  of  the  creation  or  the  evolution  of 
the  world  from  any  abstract  potency  or  primal  principle. 
We  can  know  only  what  the  world  of  which  we  are  actu- 
ally conscious  is  tending  to  do  and  to  evolve.  The  very 
idea  of  will  expresses  just  this.  And  Schopenhauer's  fierce 
tirades  against  mere  theism  and  merely  external  w  /s  of 
looking  at  reality  seem  to  point  in  the  same  direction.  He 
professed  to  give  what  is  called  an  immanent  ^  view  of 
reality,  at  the  same  time  that  he  made  a  dogmatic  use  of 
his  principle  of  will.  Will,  as  it  were,  is  the  truth  of  things 
as  they  now  are,  independently  of  how  they  came  to  be 
what  they  are.  In  so  far  as  Schopenhauer  did  not  get 
completely  rid  of  the  philosophical  tendency  to  substantiate 
an  abstraction  (in  the  shape  of  his  idea  of  will  as  an  original 
potency),  he  is  not  free  from  the  difficulties  and  the  intellectua] 
ju<5glery  in  which  both  Fichte  and  Schelling  entangle  them- 
selves in  their  attempts  to  evolve  the  universe  out  of  a  mere 
abstract  potency  or  thing  in  itself. 

The  finite  self,  in  the  next  place,  is  also  nothing  to  Scho- 
penhauer. It  is  dissolved  by  him  into  the  consciousness  that 
the  individual  has  of  himself  as  an  assertion  of  the  will.  This 
consciousness  he  held  to  be  merely  an  illusion,  a  thing  of  the 
intellect  which  has  a  tendency  to  think  of  itself  as  something 
more  than  the  mere  world-process  which  it  apprehends.  The 
error  of  this  position  has  already  been  criticised,  and  will  again 
be  referred  to  below.     The  world  to  Schopenhauer  is  simply 

^  Supra,  p.  67. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OP   SCHOPENHAUER.  455 

one  great  embodied  effort  of  the  will ;  and  knoivledgc  is  nothing 
absolute — nothing  at  all,  in  fact,  but  a  kind  of  consciousness 
which  accompanies  the  will  at  its  highest  stages.  After 
studying  biology  and  Schopenhauer,  one  seems  to  grasp  the 
fact  that  the  "  Cogito  ergo  sum  "  of  Descartes  expresses  not 
so  much  an  actuality  as  a  possibility — the  possibility,  namely, 
of  the  individual  being  able  to  take  into  his  own  experience 
many  of  the  things  which  at  first  seem  to  be  outside  or  be- 
yond himself.  The  individual  is  enabled  to  think  a  great  part 
of  reality  because  it  has  passed  througii  his  organic  conscious- 
ness :  there  are  records  of  the  whole  of  creation  in  his  body, 
in  the  system  of  tendencies  which  constitutes  it ;  and  it  is 
because  the  individual  can  legitimately  hope  to  leave  the 
mipress  of  his  personality  on  things,  and  make  some  of  the 
high(3st  purposes  of  the  universe  his  own,  that  he  is  entitled 
to  regard  himself  as  real  and  personal.  A  philosopher  who 
is  rapt  in  contemplation  (as  in  Eembrandt's  picture  Lc  philo- 
sophe  en  rhe,  or  in  the  late  classical  statues  of  philosophers) 
is  only,  after  all,  trying  to  analyse  his  experience  of  reality  as 
a  process  that  is  tending  to  complete  itself.  He  may  seem 
to  be  doing  something  more  than  this,  trying  to  think  of 
existence  in  and  for  itself,  but  he  really  cannot  do  more  than 
analyse  his  volitional  experience  of  things.  Thought,  so  to 
speak,  is  largely  an  attempt  to  grasp  within  our  consciousness 
the  conditions  that  determine  or  limit  our  activity  in  the 
world  as  it  impresses  itself  upon  us.  But  we  cannot  grasp  all 
these  conditions  with  our  mere  understanding.  The  under- 
standing unfolds  to  us  the  connecting-links  between  some  of 
the  conditions  in  question ;  but  this  knowledge  takes  us  only 
a  very  small  way.  The  deepest  thought  about  reality  must 
somehow  cease  to  be  merely  thought,  and  become  a  general 
consciousness  of  being  and  doing,  a  sense  of  evolving  life.  We 
can  be  conscious  only  of  that  amount  of  reality  which  we  have 
ourselves   lived   or  experienced,  or  which  we  have  carefully 


456  Schopenhauer's  system. 

observed  in  the  lives  of  other  beings,  and  carefully  interpreted 
in  the  light  of  our  own  ideas  and  motives  and  purposes.  The 
doctrine  of  evolution  has  shown  us  how  we  can,  in  the  lives 
of  beings  lower  than  ourselves,  see  in  the  full  range  of  their 
inception  and  performance  many  actions  which  discharge 
themselves  unconsciously  in  our  own  lives.  Thus  by  simply 
ti-ying  to  will  and  feel  and  experience  as  much  of  reality 
as  is  accessible  to  us,  whether  directly  or  indirectly,  we  may 
gain  a  knowledge  of  all  reality. 

We  need  only  remember  that  neither  philosophers  nor 
scientists  ever  agree  among  themselves  about  any  alleged 
ultimate  constituents  of  things,  to  realise  the  fact  that  there  is  a 
considerable  amount  of  meaning  in  Schopenhauer's  substitution 
of  a  dynamic  account  of  reality  fo/  a  statical  and  ontological 
account.  The  philosophy  of  will,  to  !io  explicit,  stands,  thirdly, 
for  the  general  idea  that  no  one  thing,  ao  one  ultimate  element 
or  ultimate  thing,  can  be  put  forward  as  the  supreme  principle 
of  reality.  The  ultimate  fact  about  the  world  is  not  a  thing, 
nor  any  number  of  things,  but  a  process,  a  force,  an  evolution. 
Scientists  can  never  agree  about  the  ultimate  nature  of  atoms 
or  matter ;  nor  can  philosophers  ever  agree  about  the  ultimate 
conceptual  elements  of  things.  The  fact  of  this  having  been 
true  since  the  times  of  Parmenides  and  Heraclitus  is  enouQ;h 
of  itself  to  prove  that  both  scientist  and  philosopher  are 
travelling  on  a  wrong  path,  or  at  least  a  path  that  leads  to 
no  positive  result.  Schopenhauer  inveighs  in  the  strongest 
terms  against  the  dogmatism  of  science,  feeling  convinced — 
and  rightly  so — that  the  mere  methods  of  natural  and  experi- 
mental science  will  never  enable  the  human  mind  to  come 
upon  a  substratum  of  things  that  it  will  be  able  to  accept 
as  really  ultimate.  Science,  indeed,  never  comes  upon  an 
ultimate  substratum,  and  only  mistaken  science,  science  which 
has  been  unconscious  of  its  own  limitations,  has  ever  pretended 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  457 

to  do  so.  "  Certain  philosophers  of  nature  must  be  taught 
that  a  man  may  be  an  accomplished  zoologist,  and  have  the 
sixty  species  of  monkeys  at  his  fingers'  ends,  yet  on  tlie  whole 
be  an  ignoramus  to  be  classed  with  the  vulgar,  if  he  has 
learned  nothing  else,  save  perhaps  his  school  catechism." 
Now  it  may  be  disappointing  to  think  that  we  have  to  give 
up  our  search  for  the  ultimate  nature  of  the  real.  To  abandon 
the  attempt  to  state  the  world  in  terms  of  scientific  entities 
or  of  ideas  and  conceptions,  and  to  begin  to  treat  all  concep- 
tions and  ideas  of  the  mind  dynamically,  in  relation  to  our 
practical  experience,  seems  like  passing  from  what  is  strictly 
called  science  and  from  scientific  metaphysic  to  what  is  called 
naturalism  and  to  a  mere  philosophy  of  the  unconscious.  In 
laying  the  whole  weight  of  explaining  things  upon  our  natural 
tendency  to  evolve  and  to  live  and  to  continue  to  evolve  and 
to  live,  we  seem  in  a  sense  to  give  up  the  privilege  of  thought 
to  demand  an  explanation  of  existence  which  will  satisfy  our 
reason.  Still  in  the  dynamic  naturalism  for  which  Schopen- 
hauer contends  in  philosophy  there  is  room  left  for  our  rational 
and  ideational  consciousness  of  things.  We  have  seen  how  our 
artistic  and  moral  consciousness  of  reality  may  be  claimed  to 
be  actually  the  highest  outcome  or  development  of  reality,  and 
so  something  as  ostensibly  and  demonstrably  real  as  anything 
else  that  is  alleged  to  exist  in  the  world.  It  is,  in  fact,  some- 
how implied  in  the  ver)  nature  of  the  physical  universe,  that 
it  should  rise  to  a  consciousness  of  itself  in  the  aspirations 
and  purposes  of  man.  The  consciousness  of  beauty  and  of 
subserviency  to  moral  purpose  is,  when  properly  understood, 
as  real  and  natural  an  aspect  of  things  as  gravitation  or 
organic  life  and  growth  and  development.  The  philosopher 
knows  that  what  is  present  or  what  reveals  itself  at  the  end  or 
the  upper  reaches  of  the  world -process,  must  be  implicitly 
present  in  that  process  from  the  beginning  and  in  even  the 


453  Schopenhauer's  system. 

simplest  phases  of  it.^  Thus  it  is  possible  for  a  dynamic  and 
practical  philosophy  to  maintain  that  thought  and  conscious- 
ness are  both  of  them  natural  aspects  of  reality,  aspects  of  tlie 
universe  just  as  real  as  chemical  and  physical  attraction.  The 
amount  of  reality  that  any  one  individual  may  be  said  to  know 
is  comparable  perhaps  to  the  air  that  passes  through  his  lungs 
in  the  course  of  an  hour.  The  air  in  a  man's  lungs  is  only  a 
part  of  the  atmosphere  which  extends  over  the  whole  surface 
of  the  earth ;  and  so  the  knowledge  that  one  man  may  be  said 
to  have  of  reality  is  only  a  part  of  the  consciousness  that  is  in 
things  and  that  is  as  wide  as  the  vast  universe  itself.  A  man 
may  breathe  any  portion  of  the  atmosphere  to  which  he  is 
able  to  transport  himself,  and  he  may  in  the  same  way  be 
conscious  of  any  aspect  of  reality  which  he  can  in  some  way 
or  another  allow  to  pass  through  his  personal  experience.  From 
a  universal^  standpoint  the  thought  of  the  world  is  more  than 
a  mere  abbreviated  picture  of  the  world ;  it  is  a  consciousness 
of  things  which  is  coincident  with  the  life  that  is  in  things. 

IV.  It  is  fairly  evident  that  many  of  Schopenhauer's  fail- 
ures result  from,  his  inability  to  connect  together  logically 
and  really  some  of  the  different  ways  in  which  reality  can  be 
regarded.  The  world  of  perception,  for  example,  represents 
one  side  of  reality,  and  so  does  the  world  of  thought,  and 
so  does  the  world  of  artistic  reality,  and  so  does  the  world  (or 
the  kingdom)  of  moral  effort.  He  allows  himself  to  be  beaten 
about  from  the  one  to  the  other  of  these  aspects  of  reality,  as 
he  can  find  no  one  side  of  things  to  be  complete  and  satisfac- 
tory in  itself.  This  is,  of  course,  simply  what  could  have 
been  expected.  The  true  way  to  understand  reality  is  to  grasp 
it  as  a  whole ;  and  this  can  be  done  only  with  our  total 
consciousness   and    not   by  perception   alone,   or  by  thought 

^  Cf.  infra — the  reference   to  Schopenhauer's  omisaion  from  his  will  of  an 
eternal  consciousness. 


THE  METAPHYSIC  OF  SCHOPENHAUER.      459 

alone,  or  by  feeling  alone,  but  by  all  of  these  taken  together 
an'l  supplemented  by  the  sense  of  organic  effort.  No  one 
so  inevitably  and  so  thoroughly  exhibits  the  limits  of  the  finite 
as  such,  and  of  one-sided  ways  of  looking  at  things,  as  does 
Schopenhauer.  There  is  a  penumbral  obscurity  and  illusion 
about  all  knowledge,  for  the  very  reason  that  the  act  of 
acquiring  knowledge  involves  our  attending  at  one  time  only 
to  certain  aspects  of  things,  and  leaving  certain  others  out  of 
account.  The  scientific  view  of  the  world,  too,  is  different  from 
the  artistic,  and  the  artistic  from  the  moral.  "We  are  com- 
pelled— everywhere  outside  of  philosophy — to  take  these 
things  separately,  and  we  must  pay  the  logical  penalty  of 
doing  so — the  sense  of  incompleteness  and  unreality.  If  we 
look  on  art,  for  example,  as  revealing  to  us  a  kind  of  reality 
that  is  real  in  itself,  apart  from  all  other  reality,  we  are  sure 
to  experience  a  sense  of  illusion.^  And  if  two  people  think  of 
love  as  a  thing  in  which  they  alone  are  concerned,  and  apart 
altogether  from  the  desire  it  represents  on  the  part  of  nature 
to  give  birth  to  a  new  individual,  they  are  certainly  the 
victims  of  an  illusion — "Amantes  amentes,"  as  Terence  has  it. 
"  The  longing  of  love,  the  'ifxepog  which  the  poets  of  all  the 
ages  are  unceasingly  occupied  with  expressing  in  innumerable 
forms,  and  do  not  exl.aust  the  subject,  nay,  cannot  do  it 
justice,  this  longing  which  attaches  the  idea  of  endless  happi- 
ness to  the  possession  of  a  particular  woman,  and  unutterable 
pain  to  the  thought  that  this  possession  cannot  be  attained — 
this  longing  and  this  pain  cannot  obtain  their  material  from 
the  wants  of  an  ephemeral  individual,  but  they  are  the  sighs 
of  the  spirit  of  the  species  which  sees  here,  to  be  won  or  lost,  a 
means  for  the  attainment  of  its  ends  which  cannot  be  replaced, 
and  therefore  groans  deeply."  ^  In  the  same  way  knowledge 
or  even  truth  if  pursued   for  itc   own   sake   alone   becomes 

'  Cf.  supra,  p.  275. 

3  Werke,  iii.  631 ;  Welt  als  Wille.     H.  and  K.,  iii.  362,  363. 


460  Schopenhauer's  system. 

illusory,  and  scepticism  is  always  able  to  show  this.  Religion, 
too,  if  conceived  as  a  giving  to  God  of  what  is  taken  away 
from  men,  is  certainly  illusory ;  it  overlooks  the  fact  that 
men  are  the  children  of  God  and  the  direct  manifestations  of 
God.  All  things — birth,  love,  art,  life,  goodness,  knowledge, 
devotion — are  merely  agencies  and  expressions  of  the  will  to 
live,  and  are  only  intelligible  as  such.  If  we  mention  to 
Schopenhauer  any  one  thing  or  any  one  phenomenon  in  life 
or  in  the  world,  he  is  able  instantly  to  point  out  to  us  the 
"  defects  "  of  that  thing  if  regarded  as  anything  real  on  its 
own  account.  It  is  singular,  indeed,  that  negation  interests 
him  more  tlian  aftirmation, — that  he  is  stronger  in  objectiiif,' 
to  all  abstract  views  of  life  than  in  asserting  anything  real 
and  positive  about  it;  but  this  is  due  to  the  nature  of  his 
mind,  and  to  the  fact  that  he  had  in  the  interest  of  civilisation 
to  overturn  the  philosophy  of  the  mere  idea.  "  Whatever 
torch  we  may  kindle  and  whatever  space  it  may  light,  our 
horizon  will  always  remain  boimded  by  profound  night.  .  .  . 
For  all  our  forms  of  knowledge  are  adapted  to  the  phenomena 
alone;  therefore  we  must  apprehend  everything  through  co- 
existence, succession,  and  causal  relations.  .  .  .  Therefore  the 
actual,  positive  solution  of  the  riddle  of  the  world  must  be 
something  that  human  intellect  is  absolutely  incapable  of  grasping 
and  thinking ;  so  that  if  a  being  of  a  higher  kind  were  to  go 
and  take  all  pains  to  impart  it  to  us,  we  would  be  absolutely 
incapable  of  understanding  anything  of  his  expositions.  Those, 
therefore,  who  profess  to  know  the  ultimate  —  ■i.e.,  the  first 
ground  of  things — thus  a  primordial  being,  an  absolute,  or  what- 
ever else  they  choose  to  call  it,  together  with  the  process,  the 
reasons,  motives,  or  whatever  it  may  be,  in  consequence  of 
which  the  world  arises  from  it,  or  springs,  or  falls,  or  is  produced, 
set  in  existence,  '  discharged,'  and  ushered  forth,  are  playing 
tricks,  are  vain  boasters,  when  indeed  they  are  not  charlatans." ' 

'  Werke,  iii.  206  ;  Welt  als  Wille.    H.  and  K.,  ii.  392.     The  italics  are  mine. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  461 

We  need  not  bo  alarmed  by  these  words.  Translated  into 
simple  language,  they  only  mean  that  the  intellect  certainly 
cannot  so  extend  its  range  and  increase  its  depth  as  to  become 
an  absolute  comprehension  of  all  reality,  but  that  it  simply 
focusses  reality  for  the  individual  so  that  he  may  become  aware 
of  his  practical  relation  towards  it.  We  see  too  from  them 
how  absurd  it  was  for  Schopenhauer  to  fall  into  the  error  of 
deriving  the  world  from  a  mere  abstract  potency  which  he 
could  describe  only  negatively,  as  unconscious  will.  The  posi- 
tive outcome  of  his  philosophy  is  that  reality  is  continually 
tending  to  transform  itself  and  transfigure  itself  and  transcend 
itself  in  ever  higher  volitions  and  achievements.  In  his  idea 
of  the  different  grades  of  the  manifestation  and  assertion  of  the 
will  he  has  taught  how  we  may  give,  if  necessary,  a  summary 
or  epitome  of  reality.  And  as  far  as  the  general  tendency  of 
reality  as  a  whole  is  concerned,  his  system  represents  the  fact 
tliat  that  can  be  apprehended  only  practically,  as  an  aspiration 
nr  a  purpose  which  is  only  gradually  realising  itself.  We  can 
appreciate  Schopenhauer's  position  here,  if  we  reflect  a  moment 
on  what  it  is  that  philosophical  explanations  of  things  do  for 
men.  Most  ultimate  theoretical  questions  about  the  nature  of 
the  world  admit  only  of  an  indirect  answer.  As  a  matter  of 
fact,  many  questions  about  reality  indicate  a  very  naif  point 
of  view  about  things — the  assumption  that  reality  can  be  ex- 
pressed directly  and  completely  in  some  one  or  two  simple 
positive  statements.  On  the  contrary,  the  truth  is  that  phil- 
osophy can  at  best  only  put  people  on  the  path  towards  solving 
the  nature  of  the  real,  and  that  by  unfolding  to  them  the 
conditions  of  their  own  volition  and  evolution.  "  Kant  has 
shown  that  the  problems  of  metaphysic  admit  of  no  direct, 
aiid  in  general  of  no  satisfactory  solution."  For  once  Schopen- 
hauer goes  on  (in  the  next  sentence)  to  give  the  true  reason  of 
this  fact.  He  does  not  this  time  say  that  it  is  because  our 
intellect  reveals  only  phenomena  to  us  and  not  things  in  them- 


462  Schopenhauer's  system. 

selves,  but  because  our  intellect  tells  us  only  about  the  existence 
of  things  which  affect  our  will,  and  about  the  way  in  which 
these  things  affect  our  will. 

The  illusionism  incident  to  the  very  attemjyt  to  grasp  the  world 
as  will  is  wide-reaching  in  Schopenhauer.  It  is  easy  to  see 
that  the  world  cannot  be  understood  as  anything  fixed  and 
static,  but  only  as  a  purpose  that  is  trying  to  realise  itself. 
But  what  is  this  purpose  in  Schopenhauer  ?  When  one  reads 
him,  one  finds  that  volition  or  purpose  is  something  that  is 
always  tending  to  break  away  from  the  eternal  unconscious- 
ness that  is  at  the  heart  of  things,  or  trying  to  realise  some- 
thing v/hich  in  the  nature  of  the  case  it  cannot.  All  the  ends 
that  men  theorise  about  and  consciously  strive  after  are  illu- 
sory to  Schopenhauer,  and  so  consequently  are  the  actions 
which  these  ends  represent  and  involve.  There  is  nothing- 
absolute  about  these  ends,  and  so  the  pursuit  of  them  contains 
in  itself  somehow  the  evidence  of  its  own  futility.  And  then 
the  category  of  "  end  "  cannot  be  applied  to  the  world  as  a 
whole,  because  we  are  not  in  any  way  able  to  transplant  our- 
selves outside  the  world-will  and  take  notice  of  that  towards 
which  it  is  struggling.  The  ends  of  the  world  are  already 
determined  by  the  world-will,  and  the  intellect  can  at  most 
discern  the  ways  and  the  means  by  which  these  ends  seem 
to  be  attained.  It  may  be  said  that  the  ends  of  the  world 
can  to  a  certain  extent  be  read  along  the  lines  of  wha^  the 
world-will  has  already  achieved  in  history  and  in  civilisation, 
as  well  as  in  the  adaptations  that  are  apparent  in  the  bodies 
of  animals  and  men.  But  then  Schopenhauer's  mind  is  so 
extremel)''  radical  that  he  cannot  see  the  place  of  partial 
attainment  and  of  relative  perfection  in  the  world  and  in 
history  and  in  humanity.  There  is,  in  short,  in  him  no  direct 
answer  ^o  the  questions  that  may  be  raised  about  the  real  pur- 
pose of  the  world.  His  feeling  is  that  the  will  is  always  seek- . 
ing  something  that  had  better  not  be  than  be.    The  ends  of  the 


THE   METAPHYSIC    OF    SCHOPENHAUER.  463 

will,  too,  in  his  eyes  so  much  transcend  the  mere  conceptions 
of  our  intellect,  that  he  falls  into  the  error  of  thinking  of  them 
as  necessarily  supra-rational  or  non-rational  or  even  irrational. 
And  it  is  true  that  the  world-will  does  not  seem  to  have  to 
any  great  extent  consulted  the  intellect  of  man  about  the  end 
or  the  tendency  of  things.  But  as  this  perhaps  was  hrrdly 
to  be  expected,  a  great  deal  of  disappointment  that  man  may 
feel  about  the  universe  is  purely  gratuitous.  What  is  lacking 
at  this  point  in  Schopenhauer  is,  as  has  been  indicated  more 
than  once,  a  fuller  or  more  adequate  philosophy  of  the  uncon- 
scious. That  which  is  unconscious  for  us  is  not  necessarily  so 
for  the  tmiverse  or  the  world-will  itself.  Instinct  and  impulse 
are  not  necessarily  irrational  in  their  workings  simply  because 
their  workings  are  unconscious.  It  is  by  no  means  difficult 
to  discern  a  rational  tendency  in  impulse  and  in  instinct,  even 
in  the  ordinary  physical  or  purely  natural  instincts  of  life. 
All  such  instincts  have  been  left  by  nature  in  the  constitution 
of  human  nature,  that  humanity  may  be  compelled  to  continue 
trying  to  work  out  its  own  salvation.  The  various  instincts 
that  man  possesses,  the  desires  for  nourishment  and  for  the 
reproduction  of  his  life,  do  not  indeed  exactly  guarantee  that 
a  better  moral  world  than  the  present  is  likely  to  be  evolved 
in  the  near  future,  but  they  enable  humanity  to  approach  the 
struggle  of  life  with  organisms  that  are  fitted  to  carry  them 
through  it.  This  struggle  to  which  nature  subjects  man  is 
part  of  the  means  that  she  has  instituted  for  the  perfecting 
of  his  humanity.  He  may  not  be  fully  conscious  of  the 
purpose  that  is  in  things,  but  this  absence  on  his  part  of  the 
consciousness  of  that  purpose  does  not  destroy  its  reality. 

Schopenhauer  is  wrong  again  in  thinking  that  only  the 
world-will  is  real  and  that  particular  volition  is  nothing  at 
all  on  its  own  account.  "  Life  can  very  well  be  looked  upon 
as  a  dream  from  which  death  is  the  awakening.  ]iut  then 
the  personality,  the  individual,  appertains  to  the  dream  and 


464  Schopenhauer's  system. 

not  to  the  wakening  consciousness  ;  it  is  on  this  account  that 
death  looks  like  annihilation  to  the  former."  This  tendency 
of  his  to  find  reality  only  in  what  philosophers  call  the  univer- 
sal has  often  been  criticised.^  It  is  a  tendency  which  must 
have  been  apparent  from  the  outset  of  our  investigation. 
He  ought  to  have  been  able  to  grasp  the  fact  that  volition 
in  the  case  of  individuals  indicates  an  effort  on  their  part 
after  independent  existence,  an  effort  which  cannot  be  mean- 
ingless in  view  of  the  fact  that  it  is  so  persistently  made 
again  and  again.  The  fact  of  this  persistent  striving  indicates 
a  desire  on  the  part  of  the  individual  to  be  real  on  his  own 
account,  and  not  merely  as  a  phase  or  manifestation  of  a 
universal  will.  Philosophy  has  too  often  dissolved  all  reality 
into  a  universal  principle  underlying  all  things,  because  it  has 
looked  more  to  the  intellect  than  to  the  will  as  indicating  the 
vep\  nature  of  man.  The  intellect  in  seeking  to  connect 
things  together  in  a  logical  or  perfectly  general  way,  to  find 
out  their  points  of  common  resemblance,  naturally  seems  to 
take  away  any  apparent  reality  that  they  have  on  their  own 
account.  The  will,  on  the  contrary,  is  that  which  gives  to 
things  and  human  beings  an  element  of  particularity,  of  ex- 
istence in  and  for  self.  It  is,  in  fact,  matter  of  common 
knowledge  that  prolonged  thought  rather  incapacitates  a  man 
for  action,  in  so  far  a3  it  inclines  him  to  overlook  this  very 
element  of  definiteness  and  particularity  in  things  which  is 
the  essence  of  their  reality.  Schopenhauer  made  the  mistake 
of  saying  that  it  is  the  intellect  which  separates  the  world 
into  a  congeries  of  separate  things  and  persons,  and  that 
the  will  is  really  inimical  to  and  destructive  of  all  particular 
reality  in  things  and  persons.  Both  these  assertions  are 
false ;  and  so,  consequently,  is  the  antithesis  which  they  con- 
stitute. If  anything  tends  to  sublimate  the  reality  of  things, 
it  is  the  intellect.     (It  need  not  necessarily  do  so ;  for,  if  the 

'  E.g.,  by  Professor  Adamson  in  '  Mind,'  vol.  i.,  1876. 


THE   iMETAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  465 

intellect  is  the  servant  of  the  will,  as  Schopenhauer  rightly 
says,  it  will  ^aiher  tend  to  set  forth  the  reality  of  things  as 
related  to  the  practical  purposes  of  our  Hves.)  And  if  any- 
thing tends  to  particularise  things,  to  develop  their  individ- 
uality to  the  uttermr  t,  it  is  the  will.  The  true  measure  of 
the  reality  of  things  is  the  idea  of  the  function  or  purpose 
tliey  discharge  in  the  evolution  of  the  ".'orld.  The  effort  of 
human  beings  to  persist  in  their  own  being  and  to  will  end- 
lessly is  not  an  irrational  thing,  jusj  because  it  is  not  a  mere 
speculative  fancy  but  a  real  nisus  or  effort,  an  affair  of  the 
will.  The  tendencv  of  man  to  be  real  in  his  own  life  and 
personality  is  the  highest  tendency  of  the  universe.  Just 
because  this  is  an  effort  of  his  will  and  not  a  mere  idea  of  his 
intellect,  may  he  lay  hold  upon  the  fact  of  separate  personal 
existence  and  claim  it  as  his  own.  If  Schopenhauer  had  been 
able  to  correlate  the  intellect  and  the  will  of  the  individual, 
the  consciousness  and  the  unconscious  instincts  of  the  in- 
dividual, he  would  have  proclaimed  the  desire  of  man  to 
evolve  endlessly  to  be  the  most  real  thing  in  the  world.  Man 
thinks  of  himself  as  a  real  individual,  because  he  is  partly 
conscious  of  acting  and  willing  as  a  real  individual.  He 
is  born  to  rethink  the  purely  natural  basis  of  his  life  and 
to  tvill  life  over  again  in  unselfish  and  ideal  effort.  His  in- 
tellect tells  him  of  the  relations  that  he  as  a  moral  agent 
sustains  to  the  world  of  physical  reality ;  and  what  his  in- 
tellect tells  him  about  things,  about  their  relations  to  his 
moral  purpose,  is  real  and  not  illusorj\ 

If  the  effort  of  the  individual  to  attain  to  real  personal 
existence  is  an  illusory  thing,  then  the  world  is  undoubtedly 
a  failure.  N"o  one  who  disbelieves  in  the  idea  of  man's  life 
being  somehow  made  to  complete  itself — disbelieves,  that  is, 
in  the  complete  and  perfect  development  of  the  life  of  the 
individual  as  an  individual — can  be  honest  in  pronouncing  the 
world  to  be  good  or  satisfactory.     But  we  have  no  reason  for 

2  G 


466  Schopenhauer's  system. 

mistrusting  the  effort  that  we  feel  in  ourselves  to  be  real  and 
to  be  personal,  or  the  consciousness  that  we  have  of  that  etfort. 
The  best  thing  about  the  philosophy  of  will  is  the  idea,  sug- 
gested by  its  very  name,  of  attributing  reality  to  all  actual 
achievement  on  the  part  of  man.  That  man  has  willed,  and 
that  he  has  accomplished  something  in  his  volition,  is  the  best 
proof  that  the  world  is  rational,  and  is  making  for  the  realisa- 
tion of  rational  purpose/  We  nmst  not  dwell  too  much  on 
the  palpable  pettiness  of  most  of  the  things  that  individual 
volition  and  individual  purpose  can  accomplish.  What  it  does 
accomplish  is  xcal  enough  as  far  as  it  goes.  To  Schopenhauer 
finite  volition  as  such  contains  in  itself  the  germs  of  its  own 
dissolution,  and  is  destined  somehow  to  pass  over  into  the 
infinite,  or  to  return  to  it.  Instead  of  feeling  that  vjhatevcr 
is  is  right,  he  rather  feels  that 

"  Alles  das  besteht 
1st  werth  dass  es  zu  Grunde  gelit."'^ 

It  is  true,  as  Schopenhauer  points  out,  that  any  living  body  is 
real  only  so  long  as  the  vital  forces  that  exist  in  it  are  able 
to  counterbalance  the  destructive  forces  that  are  working  for 
its  dissolution.  An  animal  organism  must  be  strong  enou<di 
to  overcome,  for  instance,  mere  physical  and  chemical  forces. 
When  its  own  energy  is  spent  these  chemical  and  physical 
forces  will  combine  to  destroy  it.  The  individual  human 
being  that  wills  to  be  real,  has  to  overcome  the  force  of  un- 
conscious nature,  and  has  to  assert  its  personal  life  as  a  higher 
force  or  existence  in  the  material  universe.  But  Schopen- 
hauer thought  that  this  very  tendency  of  the  individual  to 
separate  himself  in  his  volition  from  the  universal  will  of 
nature  was  a  thing  that  could  not  really  be  effected.     There 

'  Cf.  chap,  iii.,  conclusion, 

^  Goethe,  quoted  by  Mr  Bonar  when  describing  Engel's  '  Feuerbach  and  the 
Outcome  of  Classical  German  Philosophy ' ;  '  Philosophy  and  Political  Economy,' 
p.  347. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF  SCHOPENHAUER.  467 

is  no  life,  it  seemed  to  him,  for  the  individual  out  of  or  apart 
from  the  universal  will.  There  is  a  great  deal  of  truth  in 
this.  "Whatever  our  notions  may  happen  to  he  regarding 
individual  existence  and  individual  volition,  Schopenhauer  is 
always  prepared  to  proclaim  theii  illusoriness  or  merely  partial 
reality.  The  whole  world,  as  ii  wore,  is  one  alternating  asser- 
tion and  denial  of  the  will  t?  live,  and  the  man  that  wills 
to  live  on  his  own  account  must  be  able  to  sum  up  in  himself 
all  the  forces  of  nature,  and  to  carry  them  on  to  a  greater 
development  than  they  are  capable  of  when  not  associated 
with  the  lives  of  conscious  human  beings.  The  human  being 
who  is  not  powerful  enough  to  assert  his  moral  life  as  a 
real  thing  in  the  system  of  things,  is  perhaps  only  as  real 
as  a  stick  or  a  stone  or  a  straw  which  is  drifted  about 
over  the  face  of  creation  by  the  play  of  th^  different  forces 
that  are  at  work  in  the  world.  Any  being,  of  course,  that 
wills  separate  existence  is  to  Schopenhauer  living  under  an 
illusion.  If  Schopenhauer,  however,  had  been  able  to  think 
of  the  universe  as  the  manifestation  of  an  upward  and  a  grow- 
ing instead  of  a  downward  and  irrational  purpose,  he  would 
have  been  better  able  to  connect  together  in  his  thought  the 
unconscious  forces  that  are  at  work  in  nature,  and  the  con- 
scious forces  that  are  at  work  in  the  life  of  man. 

We  must  not,  however,  lose  sight  of  the  element  of  positive 
truth  that  is  contained  in  Schopenhauer's  illusionism.  Indeed 
his  whole  idea  of  the  illusoriness  of  the  individual  life  that 
does  not  comprehend  and  understand  itself  in  its  relation  to 
the  will  of  the  world  is  in  the  main  to  be  accepted.  In  the 
first  place,  Schopenhauer  is  quite  right  in  thinking  that  any 
mere  concept  philosophy,  any  mere  theoi'y  that  the  finite  mind 
may  frame  about  things,  is  inadequate  to  reality.  He  agrees 
that  philosophy  is  indeed  a  science  in  conceptions,  and  that  it 
seeks  to  reduce  the  multiplicity  and  complexity  of  the  world 


468  Schopenhauer's  system. 

to  a  few  simple  elements.  But  no  mere  elements  and  no 
mere  ultimate  things  can  be  a  resting-place  for  the  thought 
of  the  philosopher.  If  we  are  to  think  at  all  of  a  world, 
we  must  think  of  the  elements  of  things  as  connected  with 
each  other  in  a  vital  or  teleological  way.  And  seeing  that 
we  know  nothing  about  the  generation  or  the  creation  of 
the  world — of  the  way  in  which  the  "  elements  "  of  things 
were  first  put  together — it  is  better  to  give  up  the  wholo 
attempt  to  analyse  the  world  into  its  ultimate  material  ele- 
ments. We  shall  do  better  if  we  simply  try  to  take  hold 
of  the  world  with  our  total  feeling  and  volition,  identifying 
ourselves  with  the  creative  force  that  works  and  operates 
in  all  things.  The  idea  and  the  fact  of  will  (or  energy  or 
purpose)  and  of  the  various  grades  of  the  manifestation  of 
that  will  and  purpose,  give  us  at  least  an  intelligible  real 
principle  whereby  we  may  explain  reality.  Moreover  it  is 
not  one  that  we  have  to  assume  without  proof,  but  one 
which  we  can  actually  see  and  verify  with  our  senses  and 
our  consciousness.  And  then,  secondly,  Schopenhauer's  idea 
of  subordinating  the  intellect  to  the  will,  is  in  the  main 
sound  as  far  as  the  finite  individual  is  concerned.  An- 
thropology and  history  both  tend  to  show  that  for  all  the 
practical  purposes  of  life  the  will  and  the  moral  nature  are 
more  potent  factors  than  the  intellect.  It  is  indeed  only 
in  the  moral  experience  of  the  individual  that  a  real  com- 
prehension of  the  universe  as  a  whole  is  to  be  found.  The 
history  of  civilisation  is  the  record  of  the  struggle  that  man 
has  had  to  undergo  to  eliminate  the  obstacles  that  stand  in 
'  the  way  of  his  moral  progress.  The  intellect  is  the  chief 
tool  that  nature  has  given  to  man  to  equip  him  for  the 
struggle  of  life. 

Then,  in  the  third  place,  Schopenhauer  makes  us  feel  that 
teleology  is  undoubtedly  the  highest  part  of  philosophy ;  and 
yet  that  in  teleology  we  do   not  so  much  learn   about  the 


THE    METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  469 

absolute  reality  of  things,  but  rather  of  their  relative  utility, 
the  relative  value  of  the  service  they  discharge  in  the  fabric 
of  things.  Of  course  we  cannot  make  the  will  of  man  the 
principle  whereby  we  measure  the  reality  of  all  things,  unless 
it  can  be  shown  that  somehow  the  human  will  is  at  the  centre 
of  things.  But  it  is  just  this  that  Schopenhauer's  philo- 
sophy, when  liberally  interpreted,  teaches  more  distinctly  than 
anything  else.  A  person  who  stands  outside  the  world  and 
looks  at  it,  as  at  something  other  than  he  is  himself,  can 
never  be  said  to  have  a  real  and  sure  hold  on  the  world, 
and  can  never  be  said  to  be  logically  entitled  to  predicate  any- 
thing about  it.  In  the  chapters  on  idealism  and  art  it  was 
suggested  that  the  highest  efforts  of  the  world-will  are  to  be 
read  in  the  spiritual  purposes  of  conscious  human  beings.  And 
in  general  Schopenhauer  has  shown  us  how  absurd  it  is  for 
the  individual  to  attempt  to  realise  in  his  life  anything  that 
is  not  organically  connected  with  the  cosmic  purpose  that  is 
written  in  the  world  as  a  whole.  Nature  has  provided  that 
there  shall  be  much  illusion  and  deception  for  the  individual 
that  takes  his  own  individual  pleasure,  instead  of  the  ideals 
of  moral  and  intellectual  perfection  that  are  shadowed  forth 
in  art  and  religion,  to  be  the  measure  of  his  life  and  develop- 
ment. Once  again,  all  is  "  vanity "  that  falls  short  of  the 
highest  evolution  of  the  life  of  conscious  human  beings. 

The  intellectual  knowledge  that  we  have  of  the  world 
might  easily  be  arranged  and  schematised  in  such  a  way  as 
to  set  forth  its  subservience  to  the  will.  This  schematism 
would  come  by  way  of  corollary  to  Schopenhauer's  main 
principles.^  Schopenhauer  doubtless  imagined  that  in  his 
theory  of  knowledge  he  had  arranged  phenomenal  things  in 
the  order  of  their  importance  with  regard  to  human  actions. 

'  One  is  glad  to  see  the  attempt  to  construct  a  body  of  metaphysical  doctrine 
i)U  Schopenhauer's  principle  of  will  uaade  iu  '  Elements  of  Metaphysic '  by  Pro- 
fessor Deussen  of  Kiel  (English  transl.  by  C.  M.  Duflf.    Macmillan,  1894). 


470  Schopenhauer's  system. 

He  put  human  actions  at  the  top  of  the  scale  of  the  objects 
whicli  the  mind  can  contemplate :  they  represent,  as  it  were, 
the  hardest  things  that  thought  has  to  grapple  with  (it  is 
hard  to  grasp  the  philosophy  of  motived  action).  And  then 
he  graded  ideas  or  cognitions  in  a  way  similar  to  the  way  in 
which  he  graded  things,  making  self-knowledge  to  be  the  higli- 
est  kind  of  knowledge,  and  yet  the  kind  of  knowledge  where 
we  have  more  than  anywhere  else  to  rise  above  the  limits  of 
ordinary  everyday  knowledge.  His  interesting  dilemma  about 
knowledge  being  formally  imperfect  when  materially  real,  and 
most  real  when  least  perfect  formally,  rested  upon  the  fact 
that  knowledge  does  become  illusory  if  we  look  upon  it  as 
anything  real  on  its  own  account.  Where  knowledge  is  most 
formally  perfect,  as  in  the  case  of  pure  mathematics,  it  tells  us 
very  little  about  the  reality  of  things, — it  has  very  little  con- 
tent, as  the  logicians  say :  and  if  we  think  of  the  knowledge 
concerned  in  knowing  the  self,  we  find  that  it  tends  to  pass 
into  a  kind  of  general  sense  of  life  or  of  volition.  All  the 
mere  knowing  of  things  on  the  outside,  as  it  were,  is  shown 
by  Schopenhauer  to  be  not  perfect  knowledge.  If  we  wish  to 
be  sure  about  things  we  must  know  them,  as  it  were,  on  the 
inside,  must  know  their  inner  meaning  and  their  organic  place 
in  the  world,  and  volition  is  the  only  thing  that  enables  us  to 
attain  such  knowledge. 

Schopenhauer's  thousand  and  one  inconsistencies  may  be 
reduced  to  the  one  fact  of  his  losing  his  head  over  the  dis- 
tinction between  the  phenomenon  and  the  thing  in  itself. 
A  man  who  believes  on  general  principles  that  things  are 
quite  different  from  what  they  seem  to  he,  can  never  really 
and  thoroughly  interest  himself  in  any  one  thing  whatso- 
ever. We  have  seen  this  illustrated  in  the  Tantalus-like 
effort  of  Schopenhauer  to  get  a  firm  hold  upon  reality ;  what 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF  SCHOPENHAUER.  471 

is  apparently  solid  ground  never  proves  to  be  such  for  any 
length  of  time,  but  seems  under  the  consideration  of  that 
unreliable  intellect  he  is  so  fond  of  talking  about  to  turn 
into  shifting  sand.  He  feels  that  things  are  different  from 
what  they  seem  to  be,  that  life  is  different  from  our  expec- 
tations of  it,  and  that  even  our  memories  cannot  be  trusted 
to  report  accurately  the  things  which  we  once  experienced. 
We  never  are  something  with  which  we  are  thoroughly  con- 
tented ;  we  live  either  in  the  past  or  the  future,  but  never 
wholly  in  the  present.  Perhaps  the  cultivated  Epicurean 
who  tries  to  live  in  the  present  is  the  only  wise  man,  but 
yet  we  can  hardly  persuade  ourselves  that  he  is.  "  Our  life 
is  like  a  journey  on  which,  as  we  advance,  the  landscape  takes 
a  different  view  from  that  which  it  presented  at  first,  and 
changes  again  as  we  come  nearer.  This  is  just  what  happens 
— especially  with  our  wishes.  We  often  find  something  else, 
nay,  something  better  than  what  we  were  looking  for ;  and 
what  we  look  for  we  often  find  on  a  very  different  path  from 
that  on  which  we  began  a  vain  search.  Instead  of  finding, 
as  we  expected,  pleasure,  happiness,  joy,  we  get  experience, 
insight,  knowledge — a  real  and  permanent  blessing  instead  of 
a  fleeting  and  illusory  one."^  The  way  to  cut  the  knot  in 
which  all  this  perplexity  and  confusion  is  tied  up  is  simply 
to  say  outright  that  the  experience  which  is  here  talked 
of  is  life,  is  will,  is  reality.  From  the  very  nature  of  the 
case  too,  that  experience  must  somehow  complete  itself. 

An  all-permeating  sense  of  illusion  is  the  air  in  which 
Schopenhauer's  philosophy  lives  and  moves.  This  fact,  taken 
together  with  the  way  in  which  he  shows  up  the  contra- 
dictions in  life  and  experience,  and  with  the  many  flagrant 
contradictions   in  his  thought,  and  with  the   imperfect  way 

^  Werke,  v.  438  ;  B.  S.,  Counsels  and  Maxims,  p.  15. 


472  Schopenhauer's  system. 

in  wliich  lie  takes  hold  of  his  own  omnipotent  principle 
of  will,  warrants  us  in  calling  his  whole  philosophy  a 
quasi  general  overturning  of  the  philosophy  of  the  idea — 
a  general  jiroclaniation  of  the  inadequacy  of  the  idea  to  the 
facts  of  life,  a  sort  of  "  jyhilosophie  A  rebmirs,"  to  give  a 
turn  to  an  expression  of  Bastiat's  about  the  political  economy 
of  Sismondi.  In  reading  Schopenhauer  one  always  feels 
that  the  words  Karl  Marx  used  about  Hegel  might  have 
been  written  by  him  too.  "  My  dialectical  method  is  funda- 
mentally different  from  Hegel's,  and  is  even  its  direct  oppo- 
site. For  Hegel  it  is  the  process  of  thought,  which  (under 
the  name  Idea)  he  ever  converts  into  an  independent  Subject, 
the  Demiurgos  of  this  actual  world,  which  is  only  its  outward 
manifestation.  For  me,  on  the  contrary,  ideas  are  only  the 
material  facts  turned  up  and  down  in  the  human  head."  ^  So 
helpless  is  the  whole  philosophy  of  idealism  in  his  eyes  in  face 
of  the  all-conquering  force  of  will !  There  is  something  legiti- 
mate enough  about  this  feeling ;  thought  should  certainly  be 
content  to  interpret  things  or  the  will  that  is  in  things,  and 
not  seek  to  construe  reality  out  of  itself.  Schopenhauer  need 
not  have  held,  however,  that  thought  falsified  or  rendered  illu- 
sory whatever  was  brought  before  it. 

V.  It  may  be  well  to  look  again  at  the  strong  foundations 
upon  which  his  system  rests.  The  main  idea  upon  wliich 
it  stands  is  that  the  significance  of  the  world  can  be  under- 
stood only  in  an  ethical  regard,  and  this  is  a  very  sure  founda- 
tion if  it  means  that  the  world  can  be  understood  only  in 
so  far  as  it  has  some  ultimate  reference  to  the  moral  purpose 
of  the  individual  man.  The  key  which  opens  the  system  is 
the  reflection  that,  just  em  the  causality  that  is  in  the  external 
world  is  explicable  only  by  reference  to  motives,  so  sunilarly 
the  conscious  states  which  make  up  the  self  are  best  explained 

*  Bonar,  Philosophy  and  Political  Economy,  pp.  327,  328. 


THE    META PHYSIC   OF  SCHOPENHAUER.  473 

by  will.^  The  will,  consequently,  is  the  key  which  unlocks  all 
n.'ality  for  us,  the  explanation  of  the  whole  visible  nnd  tangible 
world.  The  idealists  are  essentially  right  in  making  out 
the  world  to  be  somotiiin^  that  is  related  to  human  person- 
ality, but  the  deepest  thing  about  the  humiui  j>ersonality 
is  will.  The  world,  in  other  words,  must  be  understood 
as  will.  And  then  as  to  how  the  fortress  of  will  may  be 
taken,  Schopenhauer  would  have  its  assailants  understand  that 
the  notion  they  may  have  formed  of  will  as  simply  conscious 
purpose  does  not  represent  a  complete  idea  of  will  at  all. 
Will  to  him  includes  instinct  and  imimlse  and  habit  and  all 
the  unconscious  forces  of  nature.  He  is  thus  intrenched 
behind  the  contention  that  the  primary  thing  about  a  man 
is  not  his  thought  but  his  volition  and  action,  and  that  all 
causality  in  nature  is  intelligible  only  by  some  reference, 
indirect  or  remote  though  it  may  be,  to  human  purpose. 

"  Only  those  changes  which  have  no  other  ground  than  a 
motive — i.e.,  an  idea — have  hitherto  been  regarded  as  mani- 
festations of  will.  Therefore  in  nature  a  will  has  only  been 
attributed  to  man,  or  at  the  most  to  animals ;  for  knowledge, 
the  idea,  is  of  course,  as  I  have  said  elsewhere,  the  true  and 
exclusive  characteristic  of  animal  life.  But  that  the  will 
is  also  active  where  no  knowledge  guides  it,  we  see  at  once 
in  the  instinct  and  the  meclianical  skill  of  animals.  That 
they  have  ideas  and  knowledge  is  here  not  to  the  point,  for 
the  end  towards  which  they  strive  as  definitely  as  if  it  were 
a  known  motive  is  yet  entirely  unknown  to  them.  Therefore 
in  such  cases  their  action  takes  place  without  motive,  is  not 
guided  by  the  idea,  and  shows  us  first  and  most  distinctly 
how  the  will  may  be  active  entirely  without  knowledge.     The 

^  Cf.  chap.  ,iii.  bcc.  3,  where  it  is  suggested  that  causality  actually  dissolveg 
itself  iuto  volition.  And  then  (so  far  as  the  comparison  suggested  liere  goes)  we 
may,  according  to  Schopenhauer,  say  that  the  reality  of  both  external  and 
Internal  phenomena  is  will ;  for  our  conscious  states  dissolve  themselves  into  our 
consciousness  (or  feeling)  of  effort  or  action. 


474  8CH0PENHAUKR  8   SYSTEM. 

bird  of  a  year  old  hns  no  idea  of  the  eggs  for  which  it  builds 
a  nest ;  the  young  spider  hos  no  idea  of  the  prey  for  which 
it  spins  a  web;  nor  has  the  aut-lion  any  idea  of  tlie  ants 
for  which  ho  digs  a  trench  for  the  Hrst  time.  ...  In  such 
actions  of  these  creatures  the  will  is  clearly  operative  as  in 
their  other  actions,  but  it  is  in  blind  activity,  which  is  indeed 
accompanied  by  knowledge  but  not  guided  by  it.  If  now  we 
have  once  gained  insight  into  the  fact  that  idea  as  motive 
is  not  a  necessary  and  essential  condition  of  the  activity 
of  the  will,  we  shall  more  easily  recognise  the  activity  of  will 
where  it  is  less  apparent."  * 

The  will  that  Schopenhauer  generally  uses  in  explaining  tlin 
world,  or  the  illusion  that  is  in  the  world,  is  the  unconscious 
will  of  nature ;  and  the  fundamental  contradiction  that  he 
finds  in  man's  life  is  due  to  tlie  fact  that  he  conceives  the 
life  of  man  to  be  for  the  most  part  a  mere  battle-ground 
between  instinct  or  impulse  and  reflection  or  intellect.  As 
soon,  however,  as  we  insist  that  the  expressions  mere  will, 
mere  intellect,  mere  instinct,  and  so  on,  are  all  abstractions 
and  not  realities,  we  take  away  much  of  the  ground  for  the 
contradiction  and  illusion  which  Schopenhauer  professes  to 
find  in  reality.  There  is  no  such  thing  as  a  merely  un- 
conscious will,  and  so  we  should  not  seek  to  explain  the 
world  in  reference  to  any  such  idea.  Schopenhauer  ought 
to  have  remembered  that  the  will  which  we  find  in  ourselves, 
and  by  reference  to  which  he  explains  most  things,  is  not 
wholly  unconscious  but  partly  conscious,  not  wholly  irrational 
but  partly  rational.  In  short,  the  truth  about  ourselves  and 
the  world  is  that  the  world  represents  an  energy  or  a  force 
which  asserts  itself  in  different  degrees  of  consciousness.  The 
very  lowest  as  well  as  the  highest  phases  of  the  world's 
will  are  undoubtedly  hard  to  understand — the  mere  physical 
force    of    gravitation    and    the    apparently    merely    psychical 

^  1  Werke,  li.  135,  136  ;  H.  and  K.,  i.  147, 148. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOtr^yHATJER.  476 

force  called  consciousness.  The  middle  region  of  volition, 
all  ordinary  activity  wherein  we  nt  once  act  and  have  a 
relative  consciousness  of  what  we  are  doing,  is  intelligible 
enough  as  far  as  it  goes,*  Our  consciousness  does  not  falsely 
report  what  we  experience.  We  experience  in  ourselves,  on 
the  part  of  the  will  that  is  in  us,  more  or  less  ratiomil  attempts 
nt  a  complete  assertion  of  our  nature. 

Whatever  we  know  about  the  world  rests  upon  the  reality 
of  what  our  consciousness  tells  ui'  about  ourselves  in  action. 
We  know  that  we  are  organic  beings  who  are  trying  to  attain 
to  a  more  fully  rational  conscious  experience.  We  are  more  or 
less  conscious  of  the  relations  which  other  persons  and  things 
sustain  to  our  personality,  and  these  relations  constitute  the 
reality  of  these  things  and  persons  for  us.  Beings  or  existences 
wliich  have  the  power  of  affecting  or  determining  lis  as  well 
as  of  being  aflected  or  determined  by  us,  are  not  mere  things 
but  persons.  Things  are  not  lasting  arrangements  of  the 
cosmic  matter  or  the  cosmic  force  that  is  in  the  world. 
These  "  cloud-capped  towers  "  and  "  gorgeous  palaces,"  as  the 
poet  says,  shall  all  "  dissolve." 

Part  of  Schopenhauer's  strength,  too,  lies  in  insisting  that 
the  intellect  is  only  a  part  of  our  total  sense  for  the  life  of 
reality.  Mere  knoudedfjc,  or,  for  that  part  of  it,  scientific  knov^- 
kdgc,  is  never  able  to  state  exhaustively  the  relations  that 
things  sustain  to  our  will.  There  are  always  relations  within 
relations,  and  the  world  is  still  in  a  state  of  evolution.  Or, 
— to  think  of  knowlcdijc,  and  the  difficulties  that  philosophers 
have  made  about  it,  —  putting  matters  at  the  worst,  mere 
knowledge  cannot  split  the  world  into  two  halves,  phenomenon 
and  thing  in  itself,  with  an  impassable  gulf  between  them. 
The  world  is  one,  and  all  the  things  and  persons  in  it  draw 
their  life  from  the  one  will.  The  knowledge  that  is  a  mere 
reflex  of  life  and  reality  can  never  contradict  reality  itself,  or 


^  Cf.  chap.  iii.  sec.  iii.  (j8). 


476  Schopenhauer's  system. 

split  up  the  universe  into  two  universes.  The  scope  of  mere 
knowledge  is  far  inferior  to  that  of  a  full  and  healthy  and 
expansive  sense  for  the  world  of  things  and  for  the  life  that 
is  in  them.  The  moonlight  or  spectral  knowledge  of  reality 
that  the  rational  philosopher  may  be  said  to  possess  is  far 
less  rich  and  full  than  the  stored-up  experience  of  humanity 
about  life.  It  is  an  abridged  or  analytical  view  of  the  world, 
which  is  real  only  in  so  far  as  it  shades  out  into  the  larger 
sense  for  reality  that  we  have  in  consciourness  of  action  and 
aspiration.  There  are  some  things  that  a  philosopher  cannot 
see  in  nature  and  in  man  unless  he  has  the  eager,  expanding, 
and  expansivo  senre  for  things  which  characterises  those  who 
live  keenly  and  deeply.  Poets  and  artists  patiently  cultivate 
an  immediate  or  a  feeling  sense  for  reality.  A  man  like 
Wordsworth-^  turns  from  the  ]^hi\osoip]\er  for  intellectual  rcasoiis, 
for  the  reason  that  the  mere  thinker  fails  to  see  some  things 
in  the  world  which  he  might  with  a  more  whole  or  a  more 
expansive  sense  for  reality  be  enabled  to  see.  David  Hume, 
although  one  of  the  purest  of  speculative  geniuses,  always  saw 
that  a  whole  and  healthy  sense  for  men  and  things  was  .. 
greater  and  a  more  real  thing  than  mere  speculative  insight. 

If  Schopenhauer  had  connected  our  intellectual  knowledge 
of  things  more  organically  with  our  consciousness  of  effort  and 
will,  he  would  have  had  more  faith  in  the  intellect  and  its 
conclusions  about  reality  than  he  had,  or  indeed  could  have 
with  some  of  the  erroneous  idealistic  presuppositions  from 
which  he  started.  He  ought  to  have  seen  and  felt  and  be- 
lieved that  our  intellectual  feeling  for  things  really  passes  into 
our  organic  feeling  of  volitional  effort.  His  philosophy  of  will 
ought  to  have  been  supplemented  by  a  faith  in  intellect  equal  j 
to  that  of  the  English  Hegelians,  the  followers  of  T.  H.  Green. 
Green's  philosophy  resolves  all  reality  into  an  absolute  and 
eternal   confjciousness  which   attains   to  a   full  realisation  of 

1  Cf.  "  The  Toet's  Epitaph." 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  477 

itself  only  in  thought  or  knowledge.  If  Schopenhauer  had 
seen  that  the  intellectual  consciousness  man  confessedly  has 
of  tlie  world  presupposes  a  cosmic  consciousness  at  least  equal 
in  potency  to  his  own  (and,  indeed,  demonstrably  more  potent 
than  his  own),  he  would  have  made  out  his  will  to  be  rational 
and  not  irrational  in  its  assertions  and  operations.  A  liberal 
acceptance  of  the  idea  that  the  highest  reality  is  to  be  found 
only  in  the  highest  purposes  of  conscious  human  beings  com- 
pels us,  in  the  spirit  of  idealism,  to  deny  outright  the  absolute 
reality  of  anything  that  is  thought  of  as  independent  of  the 
consciousness  and  the  life  of  man.  But  then  the  conscious- 
ness and  the  life  of  man  are  both  of  them  expressions  of  an 
active  will  which  is  the  fundamental  principle  of  all  reality. 
Will  is  not  such  an  unreal  thing  as  the  idea.  The  idea, 
indeed,  can  only  be  understood  as  an  expression  of  the  will, 
a  kind  of  consciousness  that  the  will  has  of  itself.  There  is 
always  the  danger,  of  course,  or  reducing  all  things  to  an 
impersonal  will,  just  as  the  English  Hegelians  tend  to  reduce 
all  reality  to  impersonal  reason.  But  then  our  analysis  has 
already  shown  us  that  the  will  cannot  be  regarded  as  having 
attained  to  a  perfect  assertion  of  itself,  to  perfect  reality 
therefore ;  it  is  rather  seeking  to  attain  to  this,  to  attain  to 
complete  reality  in  the  lives  and  purposes  and  spiritual  pos- 
sessions of  conscious  human  beings. 

Again,  if  the  intellect  tells  us,  as  it  does,  that  what  we  know 
about  reality  reduces  itself  to  the  sense  which  we  have  of  the 
relations  that  things  sustain  to  our  will  it  is  right  to  infer 
that  the  part  of  reality  which  we  do  not  yet  know  will  also 
prove  to  be  related  to  the  practical  and  moral  purposes  of  our 
lives.  The  sense  which  we  have  for  reality  may  be  regarded  as 
partly  the  sense  which  reality  has  for  itself.  As  reality  cannot 
contradict  itself,  the  future  evolution  of  the  world  must  be  one 
which  is  harmonious  with  what  has  already  been  attained  in 
the  history  of  man  and  of  the  world.      Schopenhauer's  pessim- 


478  Schopenhauer's  system. 

ism  is  based  upon  the  idea  that  the  world  contradicts  itself ; 
he  thinks  that  the  intellect  with  its  consciousness  of  ideal  per- 
fection can  never  be  made  harmonious  with  the  will  which  is 
never  satisfied  but  only  always  seeking  satisfaction.  But  this 
is  an  extreme  position  to  take.  It  is  of  the  essence  of  man's 
life  that  he  should  consciously  attain  to  the  ends  that  have 
been  set  before  him,  and  not  unconsciously.  Each  human 
being  has  the  idea  that  he  exists  in  a  sense  for  himself,  in  his 
conscious  thought.  Schopenhauer  pronounced  this  idea  to  be 
an  illusion,  only  because  he  had  the  faulty  view  of  the  intel- 
lect which  we  have  already  spoken  of.  He  said  that  it  made 
us  conscious  only  of  ideas  or  phenomena,  whereas  the  fact  is 
that  it  makes  us  conscious  of  the  will  or  purpose  which  we 
find  in  ourselves,  of  the  endless  aspiration  and  evolution  in 
which  our  true  being  consists.  All  knowledge  short  of  our 
volitional  consciousness  of  ourselves  is  always  imperfect  and 
unsatisfying.  The  reality  of  man  is  to  be  found  in  his  will, 
even  tliough  the  distinguisliing  characteristic  of  man  is  to  be 
found  in  his  intellect,  in  the  effort  he  exhibits  to  seek  con- 
sciously what  nature  seeks  unconsciously.  In  making  out 
knowledge  to  be  merely  a  part  of  the  sense  of  life,  we  have 
placed  the  reality  (as  opposed  to  the  ideality)  of  knowledge  in 
the  strongei:!;  possible  light.  There  is  really  no  discrepancy 
between  the  will  and  the  intellect.  The  intellect  makes  us 
aware  only  of  the  will  or  the  effort  to  be  that  we  find  in 
ourselves-  and  in  all  nature ;  and  the  ideas  that  it  enables  us 
to  frame  about  reality  are  meant  to  be  helps  to  us  in  the 
evolution  of  our  lives.  As  Schopenhauer  suggests,  we  must 
get  rid  of  the  idea  that  we  possess  an  intellect  to  tell  us  about 
the  nature  of  things  considered  as  something  outside  of  or 
apart  from  the  human  personality. 

In  discussing  the  freedom  of  the  will,  we  found  that 
Schopenhauer  hardly  seemed  to  make  enough  of  the  unique 
value  of  the  intellect,  of  the  fact  that  the  intellect  is  the  dis- 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  479 

tinguishing  feature  of  tlie  life  of  man.  Some  of  the  earliest 
clianges  in  the  human  embryo  have  to  do  with  the  convolu- 
tions of  the  brain.  We  may  read  in  this  phenomenon  Nature's 
testimony  to  the  fact  that  she  looks  upon  tlie  intellect  as 
capable  of  rendering  unique  service  to  man  in  the  eiforts  he 
must  put  forth  to  develop  his  life.  Through  the  use  of  his 
intellect  man  can  carry  on  his  life  to  higher  developments 
than  the  beasts  can.  Our  freedom  is  nothing  but  the  intel- 
lectual freedom  which  is  implied  in  the  very  constitution  of 
our  being.  Most  statisticians  hold  that  the  idea  of  the  free- 
dom of  the  individual  man  has  very  little  practical  value.^ 
The  existence  of  man's  intellect  denotes  the  objective  possibility 
of  his  consciously  helping  or  not  helping  nature  in  the  matter 
of  his  own  development.  He  can  present  himself  to  himself 
in  his  thoughts,  and  so  awaken  ever  better  motives  within 
himself. 

In  so  far  as  the  intellect  of  man  tends,  after  some  experience 
of  life,  to  submit  itself  to  the  necessity  that  is  in  things,  it 
may  be  said  that  our  consciousness  is  at  best  a  mere  mirror  of 
things,  quite  the  passive  thing  that  Schopenhauer  made  it  out 
to  be.  In  fact,  many  of  the  puzzles  of  Schopenhauer's  pliilo- 
sophy  arise  from  the  fact  of  his  pointing  out  a  kind  of  contra- 
diction in  the  intellect.  The  intellect  in  man  makes  him  think 
himself  independent  of  nature,  whereas  he  is  just  as  much  de- 
pendent on  her  or  on  the  world  as  a  whole  as  anything  else  is. 
If,  however,  we  take  a  broad  grasp  of  Schopenhauer's  philo- 
sophy of  art  and  religion,  we  are  enabled  to  see  how  the 
intellect,  in  making  man  conscious  of  an  ideal  world,  becomes 
an  active  thing  in  his  life  and  no  longer  a  merely  passive 
thing.  Our  artistic  and  our  religious  and  our  social  conscious- 
ness, so  far  from  merely  furnishing  us  with  unattainable  ideals 
(Ideas),  may  all  become  dynamic  elements  in  our  lives,  forces 
that  idealise  and  elevate  our  lives.     Schopenhauer  himself  did 

'  Cf.  supra,  p.  178. 


480  Schopenhauer's  system. 

not  make  the  Ideas  or  our  knowledge  of  the  Ideas  subservient, 
enough  to  life  and  to  the  will  to  live.  Strictly  speaking,  that 
is,  the  intellect — so  far  as  his  treatment  goes — does  not  eman- 
cipate us  from  the  omnipotent  power  of  the  will  to  live.  Bui 
then  if  we  insist  on  the  fact  that  our  higher  or  intellectual 
consciousness  of  things  is  itself  an  assertion  of  the  will,  rep- 
resenting an  effort  on  the  part  of  man  to  transcend  the  limits 
of  his  personality  and  attain  to  a  greater  reality,  we  virtually 
use  the  intellect  to  make  us  free  men  and  not  slaves. 

There  are  one  or  two  remarkable  general  defects  in 
Schopenhauer's  whole  philosophy  which  may  naturally  be 
thought  of  in  connection  with  his  metaphysic.  The  first  of 
these  is  Schopenhauer's  failure  to  take  an  adequate  account 
oi  feeling  as  a  tertiuvi  quid  between  the  intellect  and  the  will. 
Ostensibly,  to  be  sure,  his  system  recognises  all  the  feelings  as 
contained  under  the  supreme  generalisation  will.  But  he  does 
not  really  know  what  the  feelings  are.  He  thinks  of  them  all 
in  a  pathological  way — ^,just  as  Spinoza  did  to  a  great  extent — 
as  "  affects  "  of  the  mind,  indicating  either  a  furtherance  oi 
development  of  our  life  or  the  hindrance  and  restriction  of  it. 
The  chief  reason  for  his  doing  so  is  an  historical  one.  Owinf; 
to  the  fact  that  modern  German  philosophy  was  in  its  be- 
ginnings so  closely  connected  with  an  intellectual  dogmatism 
about  the  nature  of  the  external  universe,  Schopenhauer  could 
not  appreciate  the  message  of  Komanticism,  with  its  tendency 
(there  is  a  similar  tendency  in  some  Eenaissance  writers)  to 
find  in  feeling  a  real  and  positive  and  qualitative  knowledge 
of  the  world.  The  feelings  give  us  a  real  qualitative  and 
positive  consciousness  of  the  world  which  no  philosophy  can 
afford  to  neglect.  Eeality  is,  to  a  great  extent,  what  we  feel 
it  to  be — heart  of  our  heart,  a  life  that  pulsates  not  merely  in 
response  to  our  feelings,  but  in  these  very  feelings  themselves. 
Schopenhauer  ought  accordingly  to  have  proclaimed  those  feel- 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  481 

ings  which  we  experience  in  art  and  religion  to  be  of  the 
very  nature  and  essence  of  the  will  that  is  at  work  in  the 
world — the  ecstatic  joy  that  it  takes  in  our  life  when  healthy 
and  harmonious,  and  the  deep  sympathy  that  it  proclaims  with 
our  weakness  and  our  sin  in  our  own  contrition  and  humility 
of  soul.  If  he  had  done  something  like  this,  he  would  not 
have  made  out  the  artistic  consciousness  to  be  merely  the  sense 
of  the  abolition  (in  the  apprehension  of  beautiful  objects)  of 
the  distinction  between  self  and  not -self,  nor  the  religious 
consciousness  to  be  the  sincere  desire  to  negate  the  world 
by  abstaining  from  both  thought  and  action. 

So  far  as  the  content  of  the  feelings  goes,  Schopenhauer  tends 
— apart  from  his  general  reference  to  the  will  just  mentioned 
— to  think  of  that  as  something  that  is  simply  antithetical  to 
thought}  The  artistic  feeling  that  he  talks  about  is  quite 
negative,  and  so  is  the  religious ;  the  former  is  the  vague  feel- 
ing that  the  distinction  between  the  subject  and  the  object  no 
longer  exists  (what  good  does  it  do  to  tell  us  merely  this  ?),  and 
the  latter  the  vague  feeling  that  we  have  ceased  to  affirm  the 
will  to  live  (as  if  life  could  contradict  and  negate  itself  in  this 
way !).  For  Schopenhauer  feeling  and  will  are  alike  the  nega- 
tion of  thought.  Just  as  his  will  is  primarily  a  world-principle 
antithetical  to  the  intellectual  principles  of  all  other  philoso- 
phers, so  the  feeling  side  of  reality  (i.e.,  its  whole  qualitative 
and  characteristic  and  interesting  side  !)  is  taken  by  him  to  be 
something  that  is  essentially  a  disturbance  of  the  calm  and 
quiet  of  the  intellectually  perceived  (or  thought)  world.  The 
result  of  this  is  that  there  is  no  mediating  element  in  his 
system  between  the  a-logical  (blind,  struggling,  irresponsible) 
will,  and  the  all  too  logical  intellect. 

Goethe  in  one  of  his  poems  speaks  of  all  the  laws  and 
sciences  stalking  round  the  world  and  confronting  man  in  their 
nakedness  and  coldness  until  poetry  came  and  clothed  them  all 

1  Cf.  chap.  i.  p.  4. 
2  II 


482  Schopenhauer's  system. 

with  warmth  and  beauty.^  Had  Schopenhauer  used  feelmj 
as  a  mediator  between  "  thought "  and  "  being,"  between 
"  reason "  and  "  sense,"  between  the  will  and  the  intellect, 
between  art  and  science,  and  religion  and  science,  his  system 
would  not  have  been  full  of  so  many  gaping  oppositions  and 
contradictions,  nor  the  world  have  seemed  so  illusory  as  to 
batlle  thought  at  every  turn.  It  is  because /ce/m^  intervenes 
between  the  intellect  and  the  will  that  we  can  understand  the 
will,  and  work  out  our  lives  in  harmony  with  the  ascending 
and  evolving  will  that  is  in  things.  It  is  through  feeling, 
through  positive,  courageous,  aggressive  feeling,  that  we  breast 
our  way  through  all  the  illusory  experiences  of  life,  and  gain 
even  through  them  a  true  sense  of  the  living  relation  which 
exists  between  our  own  lives  and  the  life  of  the  universe 
In  the  highest  feeling  about  life,  in  clarified  and  exalted  and 
expanding  feeling  (will)  about  the  world,  is  to  be  found  our 
highest  sense  of  reality.  And  that  sense  is  to  be  trusted,  not 
distrusted.     The  artist  knows  this. 

Again,  after  Hegel  no  philosophy  which  does  not  address 
itself  in  a  positive  and  receptive  spirit  to  history  can  lay 
claim  to  have  taken  in  the  whole  "  object,"  to  have  exhausted 
the  real.  Schopenhauer  saw  in  history  only  the  mere  succes- 
sion of  what  people  call  "  events,"  and  what  he  regards  as 
aimless  and  fatuous  assertions  of  the  will  to  live  ("struggle 
for  life").  We  have  already  sought  to  indicate  the  reasons 
why  Schopenhauer  could  not  think  of  any  end  in  connection 
with  history,  and  therefore  need  not  dwell  upon  what  he  lost 
by  his  exclusion  of  history  from  his  system.  It  is  only 
desirable  just  now  to  mention  one  or  two  consequences  of  his 
failure  to  address  himself — for  right  reasons  or  for  wrong 
reasons — in  a  perfectly  free  and  positive  way  to  the  study  of 
history.     One  consequence  was  that  he  failed  to  recognise  the 

^  Werke,  Paraboliscli — Die  Poeaie. 


THE   METAPHYSIC   OF   SCHOPENHAUER.  483 

historical  antecedents  and  limitations  of  some  of  the  elements 
in  his  own  system.  If  he  had  been  acquainted  with  the 
notion  of  progressive  periods  or  stages  in  historical  evolution, 
if  he  had  looked  upon  history  as  an  evolution  and  not  as  a 
mere  process  of  transition  and  succession,  he  would  have 
allowed  for  the  fact  that  all  transitions  in  the  life  of  society 
are  usually  accompanied  by  some  disadvantages  and  draw- 
backs, as  well  as  by  some  benefits,  by  some  difficulties  of 
adjustment  to  new  or  modified  circumstances,  and  tlierefore 
by  sufferhig.  Germany  during  the  greater  portion  of  his  life 
was  trying  to  adapt  herself  to  the  new  ideas  of  liberty  and 
enlightenment  that  had  become  forces  among  men  in  conse- 
quence of  the  French  Revolution.  There  are,  in  short,  certain 
objective  causes  for  a  great  deal  of  the  intellectual  perplexity 
and  disappointment  that  men  may  feel  in  trying  to  think  the 
world  at  a  particular  time  in  history,  but  tliese  causes  may 
be  temporary  and  not  permanent.  The  period  of  depression, 
for  instance,  which  constitutes  so  well  marked  a  phase  in  a 
commercial  crisis,  cannot  last  for  ever ;  the  facts  of  human 
nature  are  against  its  doing  so.  There  are  laws,  in  fact,  in 
accordance  with  which  feelings  of  social  depression  dissipate 
themselves.  Pessimism  as  a  mood  of  mind,  and  the  sense  of 
illusionism  in  general,  ought  always  to  be  studied  in  connec- 
tion with  general  historical  conditions,  but  to  this  fact  Scho- 
penhauer was  blind.  A  vast  amount  of  the  mental  distress 
and  sadness  of  the  present  time  is  a  partial  consequence  of  the 
great  extension  which  our  knowledge  of  men  and  things  has 
been  gradually  undergoing.  But  the  social  action  to  which 
this  very  distress  and  sadness  is  leading  is  the  natural  outlet 
for  our  pent-up  energy,  which,  as  it  becomes  active  energy, 
will  again  give  us  feelings  of  pleasure. 

And  again  the  perfectly  unbiassed  study  of  history  would 
have  taught  Schopenhauer  that  the  idea  as  well  as  the  will 
is  operative   in   the  world,  that  men   have   shed  blood  and 


484  Schopenhauer's  system. 

carried  on  enterprises  for  the  gratification  not  merely  of 
economic  but  of  intellectual  and  ideal  wants.  Whatever  one 
may  think  of  the  Middle  Ages  of  Europe  (Hegel  said  we  ought 
to  stride  through  them  with  seven-leagued  boots)  and  of  the 
comparative  lack  of  achievement  that  seems  to  characterise 
that  period  of  the  history  of  the  world,  it  is  nevertheless  true 
that  humanity,  through  being  cradled  so  long  in  the  notion 
of  all  life  and  all  social  order  as  determined  "  from  above " 
— from  God  or  from  His  representatives  on  earth — obtained 
thereby  a  conception  of  its  life  as  something  higher  than 
the  life  of  unconscious  nature  and  of  imaginary  natural 
freedom  and  individual  interest.  Human  history  is  not, 
after  all,  merely  the  record  of  the  struggles  of  a  blind  will 
that  has  no  knowledge  of  itself  or  of  the  esscntml  dignity  of 
human  nature.  It  is  the  history  of  the  efforts  of  beings 
who  have  striven  as  men  and  not  as  beasts,  striven  to  bring 
about  an  ideal  order  they  already  felt  within  themselves, 
and  striven  always  with  a  sense  of  the  fact  that  human  life 
ought  never  to  be  compromised  or  degraded  by  the  pursuit  of 
aimless  issues.  The  study  of  constitutional  history,  and  of 
the  different  manifestations  of  that  principle  of  sovereignty  and 
government  which  exists  in  all  human  societies,  is  the  best 
corrective  to  the  blind  materialism  and  physical  philosophy 
of  life  which  is  continually  cropping  up  "  from  beneath " 
and  menacing  the  existence  of  order  and  organisation  among 
men. 

In  failing  to  grasp  the  notion  of  the  modern  state  and 
of  its  historical  evolution,  Schopenhauer  failed  to  see  in 
history  that  rational  will  which  is  the  best  negation  of  the 
merely  blind  will,  which  he,  in  the  spirit  of  early  modern^ 
science  and  in  his  well-meant  but  excessively  dangerous 
opposition    to    the   philosophy  of  the  idea,   took  to  be  the 

^  As  has  already  been  suggested,  the  evolutionary  idea  has  altogether  dispelled 
the  naturalism  of  the  eighteenth  century. 


THE  META PHYSIC   OF  SCHOPENHAUER.  485 

essence  of  all  reality.  Through  the  study  of  constitutional 
history  he  might  have  found  some  meaning  in  the  Hegelian 
philosophy,  one  of  the  strongest  merits  of  which  is  its  tacit 
insistence  on  the  fact  that  whatever  man  does  and  feels  and 
wills,  he  always  does  and  feels  and  wills  as  a  rational  being, 
—  as  a  being  whose  intellectual  consciousness  of  himself 
(dormant,  possibly,  in  the  early  years  of  life,  but  awakened 
and  deepened  through  the  various  efforts  he  is  led  to  make  to 
live  in  harmony  with  the  world  of  men  and  things)  reveals  to 
him  the  spiritual  beauty  it  is  his  privilege  to  infuse  into  his 
life.  Victor  Hugo  (who  can  never  be  charged  with  having 
overlooked  the  message  of  naturalism  and  romanticism)  in  a 
memorable  sentence  compares  the  life  of  nations  to  the  life 
of  the  human  emhyo,  in  the  fact  that  each  may  be  said  to 
begin  in  its  highest  organ,  in  its  head  or  its  highest  conscious- 
ness of  itself :  "  Le  foetus  des  nations  se  comporte  comme  le 
foetus  de  I'homme,  et  la  mysterieuse  construction  de  I'embryon, 
k  la  fois  V(^gdtation  et  vie,  commence  toujours  par  la  t^te."  ^ 
In  being  utterly  unable  to  think  of  a  real  head  of  modern 
Europe,  of  a  real  central  organising  power  running  through  all 
history,  unifying  all  human  effort,  of  a  rational  ideal  of  human 
life  in  relation  to  which  all  advance  and  all  decay  and  all 
growth  and  transition  is  to  be  estimated,  Schopenhauer  failed 
to  grapple  with  the  most  important  considerations  which 
operate  upon  the  mind  in  making  it  feel  the  world  to  be 
rational  and  not  irrational. 

1  'The  Paris  Guide'  of  1867,  1«  partie,  "Le  Science,  I'Art,"  &c.  Victor 
Hugo  is  referring  in  his  most  pontifical  style  to  Paris  as  the  intellectual  head  of 
Europe. 


486 


CHAPTER    X. 

THE    POSITIVE    ASPECTS   OF    THE    SYSTEM. 

'"Tous  les  evcinements  soiit  enchaint's  dans  le  meilleur  des  mondes  pos- 
sible ;  car  enfin  si  vous  n'aviez  pas  (?t(j  chasscj  d'un  beau  chateau  .  .  . 
si  vous  n'aviez  pas  dtd  mis  h  I'infjuisition,  si  vous  n'aviez  pas,  ...  si 
vous  n'aviez  pas,  .   .   .  vous  ne  mangeriez  pas  ici.'  .    .    . 

" '  Cela  est  bien  dit,'  repondit  Candide  ;  '  niais  il  faut  cultiver  notre 
jardin.'"  ^ 

"This  [doctrine  of  Schopenhauer's]  was  a  brilliant  and  ingenious  bit  of 
insight,  and  I  am  willing  to  incur  the  risk  of  the  charge  of  exaggeration  by 
saying  that  it  has  begun  a  revolution  in  the  world  of  mind  which  will 
bring  about  changes  as  great  as  those  wrought  by  Christianity.''^ 

In  the  foregoing  pages  an  attempt  has  been  made  to  set  fortli 
Schopenhauer's  general  suggestiveness  and  the  philosophical 
roots  of  some  of  his  leading  ideas,  rather  than  to  give  a  critical 
exposition  of  his  thought.  Schopenhauer  was  not  a  scholar 
(as  Leibnitz  was,  for  example),  although  he  had  many  of  the 
instincts  of  the  scholar,  and  although  he  was  a  very  widely 
read  man.  The  exactitude  of  mind  which  he  on  the  whole 
possessed  was  due  in  the  first  instance  to  his  knowledge  of  the 
Critical  Philosophy,  and  then  to  a  fairly  adequate  general 
acquaintance  with  the  literature  of  the  world.  But  Schopen- 
hauer was  far  more  than  a  mere  scholar;  he  was  first  and 
foremost  an  extraordinarily  suggestive  thinker,  with  the  know- 

1  Voltaire,  'Candide.' 

^  Mainliiuder,  Philosophie  der  Eriosung,  p.  46.'i,  as  quoted  (in  German)  by  Lester 
Ward,  '  Psychic  Factors  of  Civilisation,'  p.  59. 


THE   POSITIVE  ASPECTS  OF  THE  SYSTEM.  487 

ledge  of  a  far-reaching  positive  principle  in  his  mind,  and  with 
the  ability  and  the  courage  to  apply  that  principle  to  the  full 
in  the  explanation  of  things.  His  principle  of  will  and  the 
extended  application  it  is  capable  of  receiving  constitute  a 
revolution  in  philosophy.  As  par  excellence  the  philosopher 
who  objects  to  the  philosophy  of  the  reason  as  such,  and  who 
uses  a  real  and  vital  principle  in  explaining  things,  and  who  is 
yet  keenly  sensitive  to  the  ideal  things  of  art  and  literature, 
he  commands  the  approval  of  most  men  who  are  quite  willing 
to  give  philosophy  its  place  in  the  world,  l)ut  are  not  willing 
to  give  it  more  than  its  place. 

The  more  one  lives  and  thinks,  and  the  more  one  devotes 
attention  to  the  natural  and  the  social  sciences,  the  more  does 
one  feel  that  Hegel,  in  trying  to  give  knowledge  a  unique 
and  absolute  character,  a  higher  and  more  real  place  than 
anything  else  in  the  world,  has  played  the  human  race  false. 
Hegel  has  indeed  taught  many  of  us  to  think  connectedly, 
and  he  discharged  a  very  great  rSle  in  unifying  the  conscious- 
nesis  of  modern  Germany — his  services  in  this  regard  are  really 
comparable  to  those  of  the  Zollverein  and  the  organising  genius 
of  Prussia — but  he  somewhat  exaggerated  the  power  of  the 
idea  as  such.  As  has  often  been  suggested,  his  maxim,  "  The 
actual  is  the  rational,"  would  seem  to  justify  any  existing  order 
of  things  in  any  country ;  it  looks,  in  short,  too  much  like  the 
confident  offer  of  a  thinker  to  the  general  public  to  display  in 
any  way  they  may  choose  his  own  dialectical  ability.  When  it 
comes,  in  short,  to  the  question  of  a  criticism  of  life  (which  it 
is  surely  more  the  province  of  philosophy  than  of  literature 
to  give),  we  prefer  to  turn  to  Kant  for  the  knowledge  of  the 
possible  points  of  view  we  can  adopt  in  reading  the  world  and 
to  Schopenhauer  for  an  exemplification  of  the  real  principle 
of  life  itself.  Both  Kant  and  Schopenhauer  saw  fairly  well 
that  the  function  of  the  ordinary  intellect  is  simply  to  enable 
man  to  "  interpret  and  control "  nature,  and  both  saw  that  ulti- 


488  scHorENHAUEii'a  system. 

mately  knowledge  rested  upon  some  few  practical  postulates 
or  nssuniptioiis  expressive  of  our  belief  in  the  continuity  and 
consistency  of  our  experience. 

It  is  interesting  to  think  of  the  philosophical  affinities  of 
the  different  chapters  under  which  we  have  found  that  Scho- 
])enhauer'8  system  may  naturally  be  studied.  His  views 
on  idealism  naturally  connect  him  with  Berkeloj'  and  with 
Kant,  and  \m  solution  of  the  idealistic  difliculty  about 
reality,  his  getting  at  reality  through  the  "  backdoor  "  of  the 
willing  self,  connects  him  with  the  philosophy  of  biology. 
Seeing  that  biology  represents  perhaps  the  broadest  way  of 
looking  at  man's  life  it  might  reasonably  be  expected  that 
philosophy  should  proi  led  to  its  work  not  altogether  in  con- 
tempt (conscious  or  uiiconscious)  of  the  point  of  view  of 
biology — not  outside  it,  but  rather  within  it  and  under  the 
most  distinct  recognition  of  it.  Schopenhauer  was  an  evolu- 
tionist in  the  sense  of  believing  that  all  organisms  tend  to 
evolve  and  perfect  just  those  organs  which  they  need  to 
enable  them  to  conform  to  their  environment.^  This  idea,  in 
fact,  is  for  him  intimately  bound  up  with  the  very  conception 
of  will.  He  was  not  an  evolutionist  hi  the  sense  of  believing 
that  the  organised  and  the  formed  could  be  developed  out  of 
the  unorganised  and  the  formless.'^  His  theory  of  knmvledge 
relates  his  philosophy  closely  to  the  central  portions  of 
Kant's  '  Criticism  of  Pure  lieason '  (where  the  real  Kant 
is   for  ever  to   be   found),  and  his  sense   of  the  limitations 

^  Cf.  V.  d.  Willen  in  d.  Nat. — Vergleich.  Auatom.,  bb.  40-42,  where  Scho- 
penhauer talks  of  the  long  claws  of  the  ant-bear,  the  lengths  of  tlie  necks  of 
bii'ds,  talons,  web-feet,  etc.  "  The  lex  jtarsimonim  admits  of  no  superfluous  organ. 
.  .  .  The  animal's  structure  has  been  determined  by  the  manner  of  its  life,  and 
not  vice  versa." 

*  He  expressly  objected  to  Lamarck's  idea  of  a  first  animal  without  articulate 
organs,  preferring  that  of  QeofTroy  St  Hilairc,  of  the  necessity  of  an  "anatomical 
element"  as  something  given  before  all  modification  and  development. — 
Ibid.,  8.  52. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  489 

of  kiiowlwlge  to  nil  the  scepticism  ami  agnosticism  iiiHide 
the  history  of  philoHophy  ami  out  of  it.  The  apj)iiieiit  dog- 
matism of  his  view  that  knowledge  is  given  to  us  only  as  a 
servant  of  the  will  (to  light  up  its  steps  on  the  path  of  life) 
asHocintcH  him  with  all  th(!  great  practical  philosophers  of 
luunanity,  with  those  who  have  more  or  less  clearly  divined 
tiio  merely  practical  conhideratiom  upon  which  the  majority 
of  men  arrive  at  their  so-called  ideas  or  convictions. 

What  we  found  iichopenhauer  to  set  forth  about  the  bondage 
of  man  nhowR  that  he  incorporates  into  his  system  the  elements 
<»r  truth  in  'positivism  and  determiniam.  It  is  idle  to  think 
that  we  can  understand  the  world  out  of  relation  to  ourselves 
and  our  practical  life,  and  it  is  also  idle  to  think  of  directing 
man's  thoughts  up  to  some  imap;inary  platform  altogether  out- 
side the  life  in  which  they  are  actually  interested.  Any  tran- 
scendental or  "  theological  "  view  of  things,  for  example,  that 
can  hope  ultimately  to  obtain  credence  with  the  majority  of 
men,  must  show  the  ideal  or  the  divine  world  to  be  the  truth 
of  the  world  in  which  we  actually  find  ourselves.  In  studying 
Schopenhauer's  theory  of  art  we  come  upon  his  Tlatonism. 
Like  Plato,  he  is  not  only  an  idealist  in  believing  in  ideal 
things  and  ideal  conceptions,  but  an  idealist  in  the  way  in 
which  he  thought  that  the  things  he  strove  for  could  be 
realised ;  he  would  have  people  negate  all  finite  interests 
and  the  thought  of  all  individual  existence  as  the  first 
and  last  step  on  the  way  of  salvation.  In  the  vision  of 
the  Ideas,  we  were  told,  the  distinction  between  the  subject 
and  the  object,  and  between  the  finite  and  the  infinite,  alto- 
gether vanished.  It  must  not  be  forgotten,  however,  that 
in  art  Schopenhauer  connects  himself  with  biological  evolu- 
tion by  making  out  the  Platonic  Ideas  to  represent  the  species 
into  which  the  myriads  of  living  individuals  seem  naturally 
to  fall  as  well  as  the  different  planes  or  stages  of  natural 
law. 


490  Schopenhauer's  system. 

The  affinity  of  his  philosophy  of  symjmthy  ^  (the  necessity  of 
loving  our  fellow-men  as  our  fellow-sufferers)  to  Buddhistic 
and  Christian  teaching  is  perfectly  apparent.  Again,  the  inti- 
mate connection  which  he  finds  to  exist  between  ethics  and 
religion  adds  its  own  weight  to  the  contention  of  many  philo- 
sophers that  ethics  cannot  be  understood  apart  from  some 
theory  or  other  of  the  way  in  which  the  whole  world  is  related 
to  the  end  of  human  action.  While  "  the  significance  o^  the 
world  can  only  be  understood  in  an  ethical  regard,"  the  science 
of  ethics  itself  is  unequal  to  the  task  of  giving  us  a  final  ren- 
dering of  the  world.  And  then,  lastly,  as  to  Schopenhauer's 
views  upon  religion,  his  depreciation  of  mere  rationalism  and 
mere  dogmatism  about  an  external  universe  or  abodt  historical 
events  also  conceived  to  be  "  external "  to  ourselves,  connects 
him  with  those  advocates  of  spiritual  truth  who  rightly  con- 
tend that  one  can  enter  into  the  kingdom  of  heaven  only  suh 
persona  infantis,  in  all  moral  humility  and  true  spirituality 
of  soul.  Keligion  begins,  as  he  insists,  with  the  taking  up  of 
one's  cross  and  with  the  willingness  to  "  be  crucified  upon 
it " — to  borrow  the  language  of  Archbishop  Leighton ;  it  is 
an  affair  of  the  repentant  and  regenerate  will,  and  not  of  the 
logical  or  the  scientific  understanding.  The  understanding 
simply  enables  us  to  trace  out  the  relations  that  exist  amoni; 
things  when  once  these  things  are  "  given  "  to  us  as  objective 
realities ;  it  is  quite  unequal  to  the  task  of  comprehending 
the  world  as  a  whole.  Indeed,  the  world  as  a  whole  passes 
comprehension :  it  may  be  felt  and  willed,  but  not  understood.' 

Some  of  the  things,  then,  for  which  Schopenhauer's  philo- 
sophy virtually  contends  may  easily  be  recounted :   the  signi- 

^  Cf.  chap.  vii. 

*  Again,  it  may  be  urged  that  we  can  only  understand  the  world,  and  that  we 
can  never  feel  it  all  or  will  it  all.  1  reply  that  we  know  only  the  aspects  of 
reality  which  present  themselves  to  us  in  our  practical  experience.  The  postulate 
of  continuity  is  not  a  cognition  but  the  expression  of  a  practical  necessity. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  491 

ficance  of  the  world  is  ethical,  and  is  grasped  more  fully  by 
the  heart  and  by  the  will  than  by  the  head ;  the  question, 
"  To  what  are  things  tending  ? "  ought  to  be  substituted  for 
the  question,  "  What  is  the  end  of  things  ? "  It  is  better  to 
look  at  life  directly  and  with  our  whole  organic  susceptibility 
than  with  our  mere  intellect,  which  only  enables  us  to  trace 
out  a  few  of  the  infinite  connections  among  things.  There  are 
no  entities  like  "  soul  "  and  "  intellect "  and  "  mind  "  and  "  will  " 
in  the  human  personality,  but  only  one  organic  effort  after  life, 
which  is  ever  seeking  a  more  perfect  and  a  more  definite 
expression  of  itself.  Finite  existence,  so  far  as  we  know  it, 
is  always  an  organised  and  bodily  existence  (the  Eastern 
theories  of  palingenesis  and  transmigration  and  the  Christian 
idea  of  the  resurrection  of  the  body  all  exjiress  this).  Man 
does  not  so  much  really  exist  as  a  conscious  person  as  he  is 
trying  to  become  one,  Man  is  mil,  much  more  truly  will 
than  he  is  soul  or  spirit  or  tJionght ;  and  a  moment's  re- 
ilection  on  what  the  potent  factors  in  civilisation  and  "  social 
evolution  "  have  been,  will  bring  this  idea  home  to  our  minds. 
The  pressure  of  need  and  want  and  pain  is  necessary  to  make 
man  develop  his  life.  The  more  that  knowledge  increases 
the  more  does  sorrow  increase,  because  the  extension  o(  the 
range  of  our  consciousness  means  the  possibility  of  its  being 
thwarted  and  broken  in  upon  at  an  increasing  number  of 
points.  The  roots  of  the  self  are  something  that  we  do  not 
so  much  Jcnoic  as  feel  and  realise  in  organic  effort.  Knowledge 
is  nothing  on  its  own  account,  because  both  at  its  higher  and 
its  lower  limits  it  passes  over  into  something  that  is  larger 
and  fuller,  to  wit,  complete  consciousness  or  complete  sensibility 
{smnatic  consciousness).  No  things  and  no  persons  exist  "  in 
and  for  themselves " ;  the  reality,  indeed,  of  many  things  lies 
altogether  outside  themselves,  and  even  the  reality  of  human 
beings  lies  rather  ahead  of  them  than  actually  in  them. 
It  is  impossible  to  characterise  life  as  a  whole  by  any  one 


492  Schopenhauer's  system 

adjective  or  by  any  set  of  adjectives ;  the  most  philosophical 
thing  to  do  by  way  of  understanding  and  characterising  life 
is  to  let  life  answer  its  own  questions.  And  lastly,  every 
finite  individual  person  must  be  willing  to  take  on  to  his 
own  shoulders  the  tentative  character  of  his  life  and  the 
moral  guilt  of  all  merely  selfish  and  personal  volition. 

No  doubt  many  of  these  things  represent  lessons  which  are 
valuable  only  to  those  who  need  to  learn  them ;  they  speak 
for  the  most  part  rather  of  a  process  of  unlearning  false 
ideas  about  things  than  of  approaching  life  and  philosophy 
directly.  Most  people,  however,  who  have  tried  to  think 
out  for  themselves  a  theoretical  solution  of  the  problem  of  life 
come  to  admit  that  the  unconscious  theory  of  life  upon  which 
they  proceeded  in  their  own  early  years,  and  upon  which  the 
great  majority  of  men  (called  "  Philistines "  by  so-called 
educated  people,  who  very  often  try  to  become  as  "  Bohemian  " 
as  possible  in  their  own  lives)  always  have  proceeded  and 
always  will  proceed,  contained  within  it  the  sum  and  sub- 
stance of  human  wisdom.  Our  natural  and  spiritual  instincts 
to  be  and  to  will  and  to  enter  into  the  universal  life  of  things 
contain  somehow  within  themselves  the  true  theory  of  life. 
All  that  we  really  can  do  with  our  thought  is  to  make  explicit 
the  logic  of  the  life  of  the  ordinary  man  as  man — to  make 
explicit  the  tmconscious  reason  that  is  latent  in  even  the 
tentative  efforts  that  he  makes  to  transcend  the  natural 
limits  of  his  life.  In  the  language  of  Hegel,  "  The  absolute 
idea  may  ...  be  compared  to  the  old  man  who  utters 
the  same  religious  propositions  as  the  child,  but  for  whom 
they  are  pregnant  with  the  significance  of  a  lifetime."  ^ 

^  Hegel,  '  Logic ' ;  Eng.  trans,  by  Wallace,  p.  324.  Compare  what  Robert  Louis 
Stevenson  says  in  his  '  Inland  Voyage ' :  "  People  connected  with  literature  and 
philosophy  are  busy  all  their  days  in  getting  rid  of  second-hand  notions  and  false 
standanls.  It  is  their  profession,  in  the  sweat  of  their  brows  by  dogged  thinking, 
to  recover  their  old  fresh  views  of  life,  and  distinguish  what  they  really  and 
originally  like  from  what  they  have  only  learned  to  tolerate  by  force."    Or  a  fine 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE  SYSTEM.  493 

While  it  is  in  a  sense  true  that  Schopenhauer's  system  is  a 
path  to  reality  only  for  those  who  have  been  spoiled  by  philo- 
sophy, it  is  also  true  that  his  positive  principle  of  will  may 
be  made  a  real  and  an  all-inclusive  way  of  explaining  reality, 
especially  if  we  correct,  as  has  been  suggested,  his  one-sided 
view  of  the  intellect  as  something  quite  opposed  to  the  will, 
and  show  it  to  be  essentially  implied  in  the  will  itself  from 
the  very  beginning.  Viewed  in  its  realistic  and  positive  and 
non-polemical  aspects,  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  simply  an 
immanent  evohitionism  in  which  the  effort  (natural,  in  the 
case  of  the  animals,  and  spiritualised  in  the  case  of  man)  of 
all  organised  existence  after  life  and  more  life  is  made  out  to 
be  the  supreme  characteristic  of  the  world.  And  this  view 
of  the  system  is  a  very  natural  one  to  take — the  most  natural 
one  indeed,  the  only  one  that  a  layman  in  philosophy  would 
naturally  take,  and  the  only  one  that  the  world  at  large 
will  chronicle  as  distinctively  Schopenhauer's  view  of  things. 
Haeckel,  for  example,  looks  at  Schopenhauer  in  this  way, 
and  so  did  Wagner,  and  so  does  an  anthropologist  or  historian 
of  civilisation  like  Lester  Ward.^ 

The  following  quotation  from  Schopenhauer  himself  may 
serve  to  indicate  the  spirit  in  which  we  ought  to  take  all 
that  he  writes  about  the  extent  to  which  individual  wish  and 
preference  and  judgment  is  thwarted  and  disciplined  in  life : — 

"  No  little  part  of  the  torment  of  existence  lies  in  this,  that 
Time  is  continually  pressing  upon  us,  never  letting  us  take 
breath,  but  always  coming  after  us,  like  a  taskmaster  with  a 

saying  attributed  to  Pasteur :  "  Quantl  on  a  bien  dtudi^  on  revient  a  la  foi  du 
])ay8an  breton.  Si  j'avais  ($tudi(5  plus  encore,  j'aurais  la  foi  de  la  paysanne 
bretonne."— '  Cot.  Itev.,'  Nov,  1895. 

'  Psychic  Factors  of  Civilisation,  passim.  A  recent  important  brochure  on  the 
"Theory  of  Social  Forces"  (Professor  Patten,  Publications  of  the  Amer.  Aciwl. 
Pol.  and  Soc.  Science,  Dec.  31,  1895)  reflects,  in  a  suggestive  way,  upon  the 
inadequacy  of  the  old  (intellectual  and  not  volitional)  psychology  and  philosophy 
for  the  purposes  of  sociology.  - 


494  Schopenhauer's  system. 

whip.  If  at  any  moment  Time  stays  his  hand,  it  is  only  when 
we  are  delivered  over  to  the  misery  of  boredom. 

"  But  misfortune  has  its  uses ;  for,  as  our  bodily  frame 
would  burst  asunder  if  the  pressure  of  the  atmosphere  were 
removed,  so,  if  the  lives  of  men  were  relieved  of  all  need, 
hardship,  and  adversity ;  if  everything  they  took  in  ham! 
were  successful,  they  would  be  so  swollen  with  arrogance  that, 
though  they  might  not  burst,  they  would  present  the  spectacle 
of  unbridled  folly — nay,  they  would  go  mad.  And  I  may 
say,  further,  that  a  certain  amount  of  care  or  pain  or  tiouble 
is  necessary  for  every  man  at  all  times.  A  ship  without 
ballast  is  unstable  and   will  not  go  straight. 

"  Certain  it  is  that  work,  worry,  labour,  and  trouble  form 
the  lot  of  almost  all  men  their  whole  life  long.  But  if  all 
wishes  were  fulfilled  as  soon  as  they  arose,  how  would  men 
occupy  their  lives  ?  what  would  they  do  with  their  time  ? 
If  the  world  were  a  paradise  of  luxury  and  ease,  a  land 
flowing  with  milk  and  honey,  where  every  Jack  obtained 
his  Jill  at  once  and  without  any  difficulty,  men  would  either 
die  of  boredom  or  hang  themselves ;  or  there  would  be  wars, 
massacres,  and  murders ;  so  that  in  the  end  mankind  would 
inflict  more  suffering  on  itself  than  it  has  now  to  accept  at 
the  hands  of  Nature."  ^ 

Much  has  already  been  quoted  from  Schopenhauer  tc 
show  that  life  itself  is  a  very  much  greater  thing  than  all 
the  judgments  that  individual  men  pronounce  upon  it,  and 
much  more  might  be  quoted  to  the  same  effect.  In  this  sense 
Schopenhauer  himself  rises  beyond  his  own  pessimism,  and 
places  a  direct  warrant  of  the  rightness  of  their  interpreta- 
tion in  the  hands  of  those  who  find  him  a  philosopher  simply 
for  having  put  forward  the  principle  of  will  as  the  open  secret 
of  life.  He  writes  page  after  page  upon  the  comparative 
inutility   of   the   conception   or  of  abstract  thought  for  the 

^  Werke,  vi.  313,  314  ;  B.  S.,  Studies  in  Pessimism,  pp.  12,  13. 


THE  POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE  SYSTEM.  495 

purposes  of  daily  life  (where  quick  and  rapid  thought:  is  a 
matter  of  supreme  importance),  as  compared  with  the  intuition 
or  the  intuitive  knowledge  which  pierces  its  way  at  once 
to  the  root  of  the  matter.  That  is,  he  attaches  in  the 
ordinary  concerns  of  life  far  more  importance  to  practical 
experience  or  practical  insight  than  to  deliberate  thought 
or  calculation.  And  as  to  life  as  a  whole,  we  have  suggested 
that  the  only  judgment  that  possesses  objective  validity  is 
the  practical  judgment  expressed  in  the  volition  of  men  to 
live  and  to  go  on  living.^  If  Schopenhauer  does  not  himself 
exactly  put  the  matter  in  this  way,  he  more  than  once  says 
that  the  only  thing  that  life  does  bring  to  us  is  experience. 
One  may  surely  infer  from  this  that  the  attitude  of  the  man 
who  lives  truly  and  who  waits  for  what  the  world  may  bring 
forth  to  him  is  the  most  consonant  with  the  nature  of  things, 
and  therefore  the  wisest  one  to  adopt. 

All  the  passages  in  Schopenhauer  which  tend  to  show  that 
our  estimates  of  life,  of  its  pleasureableness  or  painfulness,  its 
utility  or  inutility,  are  largely  subjective,  tend  to  support  this 
view.  Life  is  an  end  in  itself,  something  that  we  cannot  and 
ought  not  to  seek  to  get  beyond.  "  Happiness  depends  more 
on  what  one  is  than  on  what  one  has,"  says  Schopenhauer.^ 
And  again,  "  The  result  of  the  life  of  the  individual  is  an  evil 
or  a  blessing,  just  according  as  the  individual  himself  is  bad  or 
good."  The  great  fact  about  life  is  that  if  we  are  healthy  and 
in  a  state  of  normal  susceptibility  to  all  the  influences  that  life 
brings  to  bear  upon  us,  we  still  vjill  to  live,  and  do  so  with 
our  whole  physical  and  psychical  energy,  both  deliberately  and 
instinctively.^    Schopenhauer  himself  once  or  twice  rises  to  the 

1  Cf.  chap.  iii.  p.  163. 

"  Cf.  "It  is  not  fame  itself  which  is  so  precious,  but  the  being  worthy  of 
fame," — quoted  from  Schopenhauer  by  E.  Rod,  '  Lea  ld6ea  Morales  du  Temps 
prdseut,'  p.  69. 

*  We  even  sometimes  will  to  live  when  we  ai'e  suffering  acute  pain  ;  or  at 
least  we  often  experience  a  curious  disinterested  pleasure  in  seeing  ourselves 


496  Schopenhauer's  system. 

height  of  saying  that  life  may  even  become  heroic.  "  A  happy 
life  is  impossible ;  the  very  highest  thing  a  man  can  attain 
to  is  a  heroic  course  of  life.  Such  is  the  course  of  the  life  of 
the  man  who  in  every  way  and  on  every  occasion,  through 
overwhelming  difficulties,  battles  for  any  conceivable  good  that 
may  come  to  any  one,  and  conquers  in  the  end,  but  may  be 
ill  rewarded  or  not  at  all  rewarded.  In  that  case  he  stands  at 
last,  like  the  Prince  in  the  '  Ee  Corvo '  of  Gozzi,  transfixed  in 
stone,  but  in  a  noble  position  and  with  a  magnanimous  bearing." ' 
Thus  does  the  pulse  of  the  arch-illusionist  throb  now  and  then 
with  the  beat  of  real  life  !  Would  that  it  had  always  done  so  ! 
And  yet,  if  it  had,  we  should  have  had  no  Schopenhauer, 
no  theorist  to  proclaim  the  illusoriness  of  mere  thought  and 
mere  theory  about  life, — an  illusoriness  that  is  especially  pro- 
minent in  the  case  of  those  who  (like  the  idealist)  imagine 
that  thought  is  an  end  in  itself,  or  that  there  is  a  thought 
aspect  of  things  apart  from  their  total  or  organic  reality.' 
We  need  have  no  fears,  however,  about  Schopenhauer's  being 
true  to  his  mission  of  proclaiming  the  illusionism  that  comes 
out  of  dogmatic  idealism.  In  the  very  next  sentence  to  the 
one  we  have  just  quoted,  we  read  :  "  His  memory  remains  and 
will  be  celebrated  as  that  of  a  hero ;  his  will,  which  was 
mortified  throughout  his  life  by  effort  and  labour,  by  wrong 
consequences  and  the  ingratitude  of  the  world,  vanishes  into 
Nirvana." 

What  is  significant  for  philosophy  in  Schopenhauer  is  not 

suflfer.  This  "objective"  way  of  lookiug  at  pain  is  one  of  the  proofs  that  life 
itself  is  greater  than  any  and  all  of  its  momentary  sensations.  "  Perhaps  you 
may  not  believe  it,  but  for  me  every  overpowering  sensation,  even  the  sensation 
of  pain,  is  a  joy." — Journal  of  Marie  Bashkirtseff,  p.  373. 

^  Werke,  vi.  346  ;  Zur  Lelire  u.  d.  Bejah.  u.  Vernein.  z.  Leben.  Anhang. 

-  It  is  really  to  this  pass  that  the  distinction  between  phenomena  and  things  in 
themselves  brings  us.  What  can  be  the  good  of  thinking  if  we  are  firmly  convinced 
that,  think  as  hard  as  we  may,  the  reality  of  things  will  still  elude  us,  seeing  that 
its  very  nature  is  something  altogether  different  from  thought  i 


THE   POSITIVE    ASPECTS   OF  THE   SYSTEM.  497 

SO  much  the  mere  principle  of  will,  which  he  sought  to  sub- 
stitute for  the  idea  of  rationalistic  metaphysic,  as  the  simple 
fact  of  the  attempted  substitution.  Strictly  speaking,  life  can- 
not be  grasped  by  thought  as  reducible,  in  the  way  of  the  old 
ontology,  to  some  one  or  two  entities.  Whenever  Schopenhauer 
talks  of  the  will  as  if  it  were  a  thing  in  itself,  we  become  dis- 
trustful of  him.  The  chief  safeguard  of  the  will  as  a  principle 
in  philoi^ophy  lies  in  the  fact  of  its  being  an  impulse  or  an 
attempt,  a  fusion  of  all  actual  and  imaginable  entities  into  one 
grand  effort  to  become  all  reality.  The  mind,  in  trying  to 
grasp  reality,  must  grasp  it  expansively  and  broadly  and 
freely  as  somv^thing  that  is  continually  changing  and  evolving — 
must  grasp  it,  in  short,  as  an  effort  after  a  fuller  and  richer  life. 
In  doing  so,  it  will  become  conscious  of  the  fact  that  the  very 
effort  to  attain  to  a  philosophical  synthesis  of  things  is  nothing 
that  possesses  an  absolute  significance  in  itself,  nothing  in 
connection  with  which  we  should  look  for  definite  returns  or 
results,  but  is  rather  itself  to  be  construed  as  part  of  the  effort 
put  forth  by  the  human  personality  to  attain  to  a  more  stable 
and  permanent  position  in  the  fabric  of  reality  than  is  ap- 
parently possessed  by  material  things  and  by  the  lower  ani- 
mals. We  think  things  in  order  that  we  may  act  better  and 
preserve  our  individuality  in  the  system  of  things.  Just 
as  we  cannot  understand  art  without  cultivating  in  ourselves 
the  artistic  impulse,  and  just  as  we  cannot  know  the  moral 
ideal  without  (as  Aristotle  suggested)  cultivating  in  ourselves 
the  habits  and  the  insight  of  the  good  man,  so  we  cannot 
understand  philosophy  without  cultivating  the  philosophical 
imindse,  without  appreciating  philosophy  as  itself  a  supreme 
eftbrt  of  man  to  make  more  sure  of  his  existence  in  a  world 
where  everything  seems  to  have  the  mark  of  finitude  upon  it. 
Philosophy  represents  the  highest  effort  of  man  to  find  and  to 
secure  for  himself  an  established  place  in  the  cosmic  process 
of  change  and  development.      The  philosopher  should  be  a 

2  I 


498  Schopenhauer's  SYSTEM. 

man  who  has  the  emotional  and  volitional  capacity  to  ap- 
preciate every  side  of  life,  and  along  luith  that  the  power  of 
thought  to  reduce  the  varied  forms  of  his  experience  and  the 
different  aspects  of  the  cosmos  to  their  simplest  terms.  In 
this  way  he  will  be  enabled  to  tJiinh  reality  and  to  think  him- 
self and  to  trace  the  roots  of  his  action  in  his  own  organism 
and  in  the  organisms  that  preceded  his  o  m.  As  soon  as  we 
see  that  the  world  is  one  will,  we  can  relate  ourselves  to  tlie 
whole  universe  and  make  our  "  dead  self "  in  unconscious 
nature  a  "stepping-stone"  to  higher  things. 

Schopenhauer's  suggestiveness,  in  short,  extends  as  far  as 
the  dynamic  or  volitional  philosophy  of  life  will  carry  us. 
His  quietism  in  art  and  ethics  and  religion  cannot  be  taken  to 
be  the  last  phase  of  his  thought.  It  has  a  meaning  undoubt- 
edly, the  great  meaning,  in  fact,  that  in  art  and  religious  as- 
piration we  already  see  the  world  spiritualised  or  made  sub- 
servient to  the  purposes  of  intelligent  human  beings.     For 

"Was  im  Leben  una  verdriesst 
Man  im  Bilde  gem  geniesst."  ^        ' 

Indeed,  the  outcome  of  quietism,  as  of  religious  faith  in 
general,  is  that  we  must  have  the  courage  to  proclaim  as 
real  what  we  experience  in  art  and  in  religion,  and  must  de- 
liberately place  our  artistic  and  religious  intuitions,  the  world 
of  beauty  and  of  goodness,  above  the  world  of  the  senses  and 
of  the  scientific  understanding,  although  we  may  not  have  the 
knowledge  and  the  critical  ability  to  justify  this  procedure  with 
our  understanding. 


Eeality  as  we  know  it  at  any  one  moment  of  time  thus 
practically  comes  to  be,  on  a  positive  and  liberal  interpretation 
of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  of  will,  a  combination  in  organic 
unison  of  an  absolutely  existent  being  (the  world-will  not  as  a 

^  Qoethe. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  499 

mere  potency  but  as  a  living,  organic  thing)  with  a  number  of 
imperfect  existences  that  we  call  things  and  a  number  of  beings 
called  2^crsotis,  who  are  destined  to  attain  through  the  ethical 
and  spiritual  life  a  reality  after  which  they  are  continually 
striving.  Every  one  carries  about  within  himself  a  conscious- 
ness of  that  active  effort  to  he  which  is  the  key-note  of  the  ex- 
istence of  the  self  and  of  that  of  all  other  living  beings.  We 
are  never  so  sure  of  ourselves  as  when  we  are  acting  with  our 
whole  activity ;  when  we  reflect  about  ourselves  we  are  always 
in  doubt  about  ourselves,  but  never  so  when  we  act.  This  is 
the  element  of  plain  truth  which  underlies  all  Schopenhauer's 
difficulties  about  knowledge.^  If  by  knowledge  we  mean  a 
corporate  and  organic  sense  of  things,  in  that  case  we  do  know 
the  world  as  whole  and  unified ;  but  if  by  knowledge  we  mean 
the  dissecting  intellectual  activity  of  the  understanding,  then 
in  that  case  we  know  the  world  only  in  sections  and  "  in 
part."  The  knowledge  of  the  world  in  sections  has  of  course 
more  of  a  practical  than  a  theoretical  value.  It  is  absurd 
to  think  about  and  to  seek  after  the  intellif/ihlc  meaniwj  of 
things  as  such,  as  if  that  were  anything  on  its  own  account.. 
The  construction  put  upon  things  by  the  understanding  has 
reference  only  to  the  wants  of  the  will  and  the  exigencies  of 
our  practical  life. 

It  is  convenient,  for  instance,  in  interpreting  nature, — in 
thinking  about  the  relation  of  so-called  iiiert  matter  to  the 
forces  and  the  life  that  is  in  the  universe, — to  imagine  to  our- 

^  "  Philosophy  alone  is  the  study  of  [the]  reality  itself  both  as  fact  and  con- 
sciousness. The  contemplative  consciousness  ?  or  the  active  ?  Not  the  former, 
for  by  the  very  fact  that  it  contemplates  and  reflects  [Is  not  this  Schopenhauer's 
contention  ?  See  chap,  iii.],  it  changes  an<l  abstracts  ;  but  in  the  second,  in  which 
we  are  the  whole  of  ourselves,  in  which,  along  with  the  sentiment  and  the  action 
of  practical  life,  we  obtain  the  most  intense  sentiment  of  reality.  This  reality, 
moreover,  is  not  immobile  and  as  if  crystallised  in  the  past ;  it  is  in  the  process 
of  becoming  and  determines  the  future.  It  embraces  then  as  one  moment  tlie 
done  and  the  to-be-done^  the  realised  and  the  more  or  less  conscious  ideal  which 
realises  it." — Alfred  Fouill^e,  'Internat.  Jour,  of  Ethics,'  Jan.  1896. 


500  Schopenhauer's  system. 

selves  such  things  as  "  atoms  "  and  "  cells  "  (simple  organisms) ; 
but  there  are  no  such  things  as  atoms  or  material  minima  on 
which  forces  from  without  may  be  thought  to  act,  or  cells 
which  can  be  regarded  as  Jii'st  cells  (cells  which  do  not  need 
to  be  explained  by  reference  to  antecedent  cellular  matter). 
The  soul  of  man,  too,  is  an  ideal  thing  or  a  fiction  inasmuch  as 
it  is  merely  the  inward  reflection  or  the  consciousness  that  he 
has  of  his  evolving  life.  It  is  as  an  organic  functioning  being 
tliat  man  is  real ;  and  so  the  soul,  like  most  other  ontological 
entities,  is  to  be  explained  (after  Schopenhauer)  not  statically 
but  dynamically.  Aristotle  saw  this,  and  expressed  it  in 
his  definition  of  the  soul  as  "  the  first  realisation  of  a  body 
potentially  endowed  with  life " :  ^  but  the  German  spiritual 
philosophy  of  the  nineteenth  century  evidently  felt  it  best 
in  the  interests  of  religion  and  other  ideal  things  to  put 
forward  the  ontology  of  the  idea  or  the  spiritual  soul  as 
opposed  to  the  ortology  of  crass  matter  or  the  material 
body.  It  is  not,  however,  a  service  to  religion  to  reduce  man 
wholly  to  spirit ;  to  do  so  plays  too  easily  into  the  hands  of 
.pantheism. 

It  is  the  same  with  'he  will  and  the  intellect  and  the 
feeling  of  man ;  every  one  of  these  faculties  must  be  ex- 
plained dynamically  in  order  to  be  understood :  the  will  is  the 
life-force  that  pulsates  through  man's  nature,  and  the  intellect 
is  the  partial  knowledge  that  he  has  of  his  life,  and  feeling 
is  the  reflex  or  measure  of  the  effort  or  energy  which  makes 
him  what  he  is.  And  so  on  with  such  things  as  the  "soul 
of  the  world,"  and  the  "Zeit-Geist"  and  the  "will  of  the 
people."  None  of  these  things  are  definite  and  absolute 
realities  on  their  own  account,  but  are  all  intelligible  only 
as  aspects  of  the  life  or  the  will  that  assert  itself  everywhere. 
All  explanations  of  things  other  than  as  phases  or  grades  of 
the  will  to  live  are  in  a  sense  fictitious  and  abstract ;  they 

'  De  Anima,  ii.  1,  412  a. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  501 

very  often  begin  by  defining  things  as  "  that  which  "  and  so 
on.  Heat,  for  example^  is  said  to  be  a  particular  mode  of 
motion,  and  "  life  "  to  be  that  property  of  organised  matter 
in  virtue  of  which  it  can  move  from  place  to  place  and 
nourish  itself  and  reproduce  itself.  Schopenhauer's  ability  to 
adopt  the  phraseology  either  of  materialism  or  of  idealism 
rests  upon  the  knowledge  that  all  merely  statical  and  onto- 
logical  explanations  of  things  are  inadequate.  All  volition 
and  all  forms  of  organic  life  and  of  physical  energy  are 
assertions  of  the  will  which  is  the  life  of  the  world.  That 
life  is  material  and  spiritual  at  the  same  time.  The  whole 
difficulty  of  life  consists  in  infusing  a  spiritual  meaning 
into  what  is  called  material.  '     ,' 

That  the  world  is  will  or  life,  is  the  only  complete  answer 
to  the  question  about  the  nature  of  reality.  All  definitions 
of  the  real  according  to  the  point  of  view  of  any  one  science, 
or  of  history,  or  of  art,  are  relevant  enough  as  far  as  they 
go ;  but  they  all  stop  short  of  unfolding  the  complete  nature 
of  things.  It  is  true,  for  instance,  that  the  world  as  we  know 
it  consists  of  matter  and  force,  and  that  all  changes  in  the 
world  are  explicable  as  transformations  of  energy  ;  but  it  is 
equally  true  (as  the  idealist  would  put  it)  that  the  world  is  a 
stage  which  seems  to  have  been  erected  for  the  evolution 
of  the  conscious  life  of  man,  and  is  consequently  most  truly 
intelligible  as  sim]^>ly  "  objectified  spirit."  Realism  and  ideal- 
ism, in  short,  are  both  looking  at  two  sides  of  one  reality 
(the  will  of  the  world) ;  the  former  sees  the  material  condition 
under  which  all  life  exhibits  itself,  and  the  latter  the  growth 
in  internalisation  or  spirituality,  of  which  all  "  external "  force 
and  movement  and  surmounting  of  obstacles  is  the  mere 
symbol  or  condition.  No  statical  or  ontological  definition  of 
reality  is  adequate  to  the  living  personal  reality  of  the 
world.  Our  answer  to  the  question,  What  is  the  real  ? 
always  depends  upon  the  point  of  view  we  adopt  in  looking 


502  SCHOPENHAUER  d   SYSTEM. 

upon  things.^  A  definition  of  the  real  may  apparently  be 
perfectly  "  objective  "  and  valid,  or  it  may  apparently  be  logic- 
ally perfect  (e.g.,  the  world  consists  of  appearance  and  reality, 
of  something  that  appears  and  of  the  appearance  of  that  some- 
thing), and  yet  fail  to  do  justice  to  the  fulness  of  reality, 
fall  short  of  setting  forth  the  volitional  and  personal  character 
of  reality.  Of  course  the  real — I  wisli  to  avoid  the  expression 
the  ultimate  real — is  in  its  central  life  or  essence  unknowable, 
in  the  sense  that  life  is  greater  than  knowledge  and  cannot 
be  grasped  by  something  that  it  merely  engenders  or  creates 
(knowledge),  and  that  it  cannot  be  grasped  by  anytliing  short 
of  the  impulse  after  life  which  it  essentially  is  itself. 

It  is  the  same  with  every  phenomenon  or  event  in  the  world. 
It  is  what  we  find  it  to  be  from  the  point  of  view  we  adopt. 
Thought  is  a  secretion  of  the  grey  matter  of  the  brain,  and 
hearing  is  a  molecular  process  which  is  converted  into  a 
neural  process,  and  the  colour  of  many  insects  is  a  device 
(imitation)  on  the  part  of  nature  to  disguise  them  from  their 
enemies,  and  government  is  (as  far  as  we  can  see  with  our 
eyes)  force  or  power,  and  love  is,  in  the  last  resort,  a  passion, 
and  so  on.  All  these  definitions  are  perfectly  final  from  some 
one  point  of  view  or  other,  yet  we  could  not  write  the  word 
only  after  the  is  in  any  one  instance.  There  is  nothing  in 
the  world  but  the  one  will  after  life  and  better  life,  and  the 
various  forms  in  which  that  will  expresses  itself.  The  only 
absolutely  true  statement  about  the  nature  of  the  real  is  the 
conscious  reference  back  (in  the  impulse  to  live)  of  "  reality  " 
to  itself,  as  itself  (in  the  life  it  wills)  the  best  explanation  of 
itself.  We  are  bordering  on  tautology,  but  tautology  has 
always  the  possible  value  of  letting  a  thing  speak  for  itself, 

^  Cf.  "Please  remember  that  o])timism  and  pessimism  are  definitions  of  the 
world,  and  that  our  own  reactions  on  the  world,  small  as  they  are  in  bulk,  are 
parts  of  it,  and  necessarily  help  to  determine  the  definition.  They  'may  be  the 
decisive  elements  in  detcrmininy  the  definition."  —  Prof.  W.  James,  'Internat. 
Jour,  of  Ethics,'  Oct.  1895,  p.  22. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OP   THE   SYSTEM.  503 

of  clearing  the  way  for  vision.  In  clear  vision  and  in  true  life 
we  do  learn  the  reality  of  things.  " '  Things  are  what  they 
are,'  says  Bishop  Butler  in  his  unadorned  but  forcible  English 
— '  things  are  what  they  are,  and  the  conseciuences  of  them  will 
be  what  they  will  be ;  why,  then,  should  we  desire  to  be  de- 
ceived ? '     Yet  men  do  deceive  themselves  every  day."  ^ 

Say  what  one  will  about  Schopenhauer,  he  seems,  after  all 
(his  transcendental  metaphysic  A  la  Fichte  and  Schelling  apart), 
to  take  the  world  as  it  is,  and  this  is  why  scientific  men  often 
agree  with  his  philosophy,  while  philosophers  do  not.  Every 
one  who  has  been  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  the  positive  method 
of  science  must  sympathise  with  Schopenhauer  in  his  ridicule 
(he  thinks  tlie  ridicule  justified  because  serious  positive  exam- 
ination is  out  of  the  question)  of  that  most  vicious  aspect  of 
German  philosophy,  so  prominent  in  the  Hegelian^  dialectic  and 
Fichte's  Wissenschaftslchre,  whereby  it  always  i^eems  to  be 
telling  us  what  a  fact  7nust  he  before  we  know  what  it  is. 
If  you  only  thump  your  lecture-desk  hard  enough,  Schopen- 
hauer suggests,  and  just  insist  with  a  suflficient  amount  of 
effrontery  that  "  of  course  such  things  as  the  '  absolute  idea ' 
or  '  pure  being '  must  exist,"  you  will  carry  your  blue-eyed 
Teutonic  audience  with  you  wherever  you  wish  to  go.  No 
doubt  German  philosoph)'^  took  a  terribly  long  road  to  reality 
after  Kant,  and  one  might  say  that  the  whole  movement  of 
thought  from  Fichte  and  Hegel  to  Herbart  and  Schopenhauer 
simply  chronicles  the  struggle  which  the  German  mind  had  to 
go  through  before  it  could  look  at  things  fairly  and  squarely 
and  positively.  It  is  in  this  sense  that  one  feels  inclined  to 
assent  to  what  Engels  says  about  Hegel  in  his  essay  upon 

*  Professor  Andrew  Seth,  A  Graduation  Address,  '  Tiie  Scottish  Review,'  July 
1895. 

^  The  first  signs  of  this  method  of  procedure  are  to  be  traced,  n  ording  to 
Professor  Adamson,  to  Fichte's  '  Kritik  aller  Offenbarung.'  Fichte  (lilackwood's 
Philosophical  Classics;. 


504  Schopenhauer's  system. 

Feuerbach :  "  With  Hegel  all  philosophy  ends,  partly  because 
it  is  he  who  apprehends  its  whole  development  in  his  system, 
and  partly  because,  without  intending  it,  he  has  pointed  the 
way  out  of  the  labyrinth  of  systems  to  the  really  positive 
knowledge  of  the  world."  ^ 

From  Schopenhauer  we  learn  that  it  is  the  law  of  man's 
nature  to  idealise  the  real  and  to  think  of  the  idealities  of  his 
own  making  as  realities  in  oidcr  that  he  may  pursue  them  and 
attain — perhaps  not  to  them,  but  at  least  to  the  development 
of  his  own  personality  through  the  search  and  the  effort  itself. 
Or  rather  nature  lias  so  made  man  that  in  his  evolution  he 
becomes  conscious  of  different  planes  of  reality,  of  different 
grades  of  the  will  (in  the  language  of  Schopenhauer) ;  each 
new  object,  from  the  playthings  of  his  childhood  up  to  the 
ideal  creations  of  his  youth  and  the  hard  ambitions  of  his 
manhood,  commands  almost  his  loholc  attention  for  the  time 
being,  and  so  brings  him  from  time  to  time  the  sense  of 
partial  failure,  owing  to  the  non-attainment  of  what  he  sought 
so  earnestly.  In  this  way  man  obtains  a  consciousness  of  the 
fact  that  the  only  thing  that  is  true  about  life  is  that  it  is  a 
pursuit.  This  is  the  meaning  of  all  that  Schopenhauer  says 
about  the  restlessness  and  the  constant  struggle  of  life.  The 
law  of  the  pursuit  of  man's  life  and  the  law  of  his  gradual 
disenchantment  and  partial  attainment  would  be  a  very  im- 
portant thing  for  philosophers  to  work  out.^  Schopenhauer 
fails  to  do  this,  or  at  least  he  does  it  only  indirectly  and 
negatively  in  what  we  have  called  his  illusionisni.  If  philo- 
sophy were  to  do  what  we  have  just  suggested,  it  would 
become  doubly  convinced  of  the  fact  that  the  world  can  be 
understood  only  in  a  practical  and  an  ethical  regard,  a  truth 

^  Bonar,  Philosophy  and  Political  Economy,  p.  347. 

-  It  may  be  said  that  von  Hartmann  has  attempted  this  in  his  law  of  the 
three  stages  of  illusion  as  applied  to  both  the  individual  and  the  race.  There  is  a 
great  deal  in  von  Hartmann  about  the  objective  reality  of  pessimism  or  the  neces- 
sity of  illusion  both  to  the  individual  and  the  race  that  is  of  the  utmost  value. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THL   SYSTEM.  505 

which   it  is  Schopenhauer's  signal  service   to   philosophy   to 
have  emphasised. 

A  great  part  of  the  secret  of  living  is  not  to  allow  the 
merely  illusory  things  of  life  and  the  negative  aspects  of  our 
own  experience  and  the  partial  character  of  the  lives  of  most 
men  to  occupy  our  thoughts  too  deeply;  they  might  so  "fill 
our  consciousness  "  that  our  development  would  be  seriously 
obstructed.  Schopenhauer  perhaps  thought  he  had  learned  the 
secret  of  life  in  his  "  favourite  tiick "  {Kniff)  of  "  suddenly 
pouring "  on  to  the  most  vivid  "  impression  or  the  deepest 
feeling  "  the  "  coldest  "  and  the  most  "  abstract "  thought,  "  so 
as  to  freeze  it  cold  "  and  be  able  to  "  preserve  "  it.  He  talks 
of  this  as  a  veritable  "  trick  of  genius,"  maintaining  that  there 
is  a  kind  of  secret  trick  or  artistic  sleight  behind  all  the 
productions  of  genius.  The  most  sane  kind  of  genius,  how- 
ever, would  know  the  danger  of  turning  on  the  tap  of  cold 
thought  too  suddenly  at  the  moment  of  actual  enjoyment ; 
the  well-spring  of  pure  feeling  might  be  thus  frozen  at  its 
source.  The  most  powerful  and  the  most  sane  genius  would 
be  capable  of  deliberately  allowing  his  feeling  to  transcend  his 
thought,  knowing  that  feeling  connects  us  with  the  life  of  the 
universe   as   a  whole,  while  the  understanding^  never   does. 

^  One  should  never  forget  that  a  really  good  intellect  means  on  the  whole  a 
fairly  powerful  and  accurate  understanding,  with  at  least  something  of  the  mathe- 
matical and  scientific  power  of  analysis — the  power  of  seeing  the  connections  in 
tilings.  It  seems  possible  for  a  man  to  have  an  element  of  genius  without  having 
a  really  good  understanding  ;  many  men  of  undoubted  genius,  for  example,  have 
never  been  able  to  tolerate  viathematics.  Schopenhauer  affects  to  despise  the 
mathematical  intellect.  He  says  it  shows  only  that  a  man  has  a  capacity  for 
tracing  out  the  quantitative  relations  among  things— these  relations  being  in  his 
eyes  the  most  external  and  the  poorest  aspects  of  reality.  Hut  it  is  wTong  to  dis- 
sociate the  mathematical  aspects  of  reality  from  the  other  aspects.  A  good  mind 
can  see  things  connectedly.  Xaut,  for  example — perhaps  the  strongest  intellect 
the  world  has  ever  seen — had  the  mathematical  faculty,  or  the  power  of  tracing 
relations  and  connections  where  others  might  fail  to  find  them.  There  must  be 
something  in  mere  genius  akin  to  feeling — the  power  of  appreciating  things  whole. 
Many  poets  and  artists  have  felt  the  world  to  be  whole,  have  had  the  synthetic 
faculty,  who  were  unable  to  show  just  how  the  different  phases  of  reality  were 
connected  with  each  other,  how  the  world  was  actualli/  one  and  whole. 


506  Schopenhauer's  system. 

The  real  "  trick  "  of  genius  would  be  to  enjoy  reality  and  yet 
consciously  to  enjoy  it,  to  be  able  to  think  it  and  yet  to 
approach  it  at  the  same  time  directly.  Napoleon  as  a  genius 
of  action  must  have  had  something  of  this  ability,  although 
because  associated  too  much  with  the  love  of  personal  power 
it  must  have  lost  in  spontaneity.  Goethe  tells  us  that  he 
who  would  speak  of  love  must  have  lived  it  in  his  heart.^ 
But  Goethe  himself  sacrificed  too  much  to  the  mere  experience 
of  life,  refusing  often  in  his  mind  to  contemplate  any  of  the 
well-marked  aspects  or  relations  of  actions  (their  moral  quality, 
for  instance,  or  their  consequences)  other  than  their  rplations 
to  the  pleasure  or  interest  of  the  agent.  Shakespeare's  genius, 
as  the  most  objective  the  world  has  ever  seen,  was  naturally 
the  most  sane. 

The  fact  of  pain  and  disappointment  is  a  matter  to  which 
Schopenhauer  has  done  almost  as  much  justice  as  have  the 
professed  exponents  of  Christianity  and  Buddhism.  It  is 
impossible  to  will  and  to  live  without  suffering,  he  reminds 
us  a  thousand  times.  The  actual  fact  of  suffering  has  not 
been  considered  at  great  length  in  this  volume,  but  the  meta- 
physical importance  of  the  fact  has  not  been  overlooked.^ 

Just  as  Malthus  overturned  Godwin's  Utopia  of  a  world 
where  "  natural  justice "  should  prevail  and  the  natural 
wishes  of  man  find  free  scope  by  pointing  to  the  two  simple 
facts  of  the  desire  of  all  animal  life  to  multiply  itself  and 
the  need  for  food,  so  Schopenhauer  overturns  most  philo- 
sophical temples  and  republics  and  systems  by  emphasising 
the  fact  that  of  more  than  three-fourths  of  the  life  of  more 
than  three-fourths  of  human  beings  it  may  be  asserted  that 
life  brings  with  it  a  profound  sense  of  disappointment  and 

'  "Eh  du  von  der  Liebe  eprichst 

Lass  8ie  erat  im  Herzen  leben." 
"  Cf.  pp.  215,  220.  :. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  507 

failure  and  pain  (which  at  death  possibly  rises  to  the  level 
of  acquiescence  and  resignation),  and  that  the  life  of  the  ma- 
jority of  human  beings,  as  well  as  that  of  all  animals,  is  char- 
acterised by  unceasing  struggle  and  effort.  It  is  no  way  out 
of  Schopenhauer's  clutches  to  say  (as  most  men  of  the  world 
do  say)  that  of  course  the  only  sensible  man  is  the  man  who 
has  ceased  to  form  any  expectations  whatever  about  life ;  for, 
on  the  very  principles  of  Schopenhauer,  the  man  who  has  no 
expectations  and  no  desires  has  practically  ceased  to  live  in 
any  real  sense  of  the  word.  It  is  true  that  Schopenhauer 
says  we  ought  to  give  up  willing ;  but  he  can  mean  by  that, 
and  he  really  does  mean,  only  the  abandonment  of  all  effort 
after  mere  personal  satisfaction  (although  he  knows  perfectly 
well  that  such  efforts  will  never  be  abandoned  by  the  majority 
of  men). 

It  is  interesting  to  remember  that  Scliopenhauer,  while 
thrusting  upon  philosophy  the  necessity  of  reckoning  seri- 
ously witli  what  is  called  naturalism,  —  "  psychologus  nemo 
nisi  physiologus,"  as  Johannes  Miiller  used  to  say, — is  not 
a  victim  of  the  false  metaphysic  of  materialism  or  dogmatic 
evolutionism.^  He  did  not  seriously  believe  in  the  actual 
historical  evolution  of  the  conscious  from  the  unconscious, 
in  spite  of  the  fact  of  his  talking  about  thought  as  a  chance 
light  developed  out  of  the  blind  will  in  its  struggle  with  na- 
ture. He  knew  as  a  philosopher  that  what  is  called  "  matter  " 
implies  the  existence  of  mind  or  consciousness,  and  that,  as  a 
recent  President  of  the  British  Association  is  reported  to  have 
said,  "  the  origin  of  life,  the  first  transition  from  lifeless  things 
to  living  matter,  is  a  riddle  which  lies  beyond  our  scope."  ^ 
And  again,  when  we  agree  with  his  contention  that  life  and 
the  world  are  will,  we  are  thinking  of  all  the  grades  of  the 
assertion  of  the  will,  including  physical  energy  and  intellectual 

»  Cf.  pp.  37,  383.  ^  Report  of  the  Atldreaa  of  1893, 


508  Schopenhauer's  system. 

and  pesthetical  and  moral  activity.  Unfortunately  it  is  often 
the  same  with  Schopenhauer  as  it  is  with  Hegel :  metaphysical 
and  physical  evolution  are  not  always  clearly  distinguished 
from  each  other ;  or  rather  both  philosophers  often  write  as 
if  metaphysical  evolution  were  something  that  actually  took 
place  as  matter  of  fact  somewhere  else  than  in  the  brain  of 
the  thinker.  A  metaphysical  analysis  of  the  world  must 
naturally  always  be  taken  in  a  timeless  or  ideal  (non-his- 
torical) sense.  From  the  point  of  view  of  dialectic,  the  world 
is  ideally  perfect,  even  although  the  will  is  always  seeking 
to  assert  itself  anew  in  different  finite  individuals.  Man 
as  evolving  will  can,  in  the  ethical  and  the  artistic  and  the 
religious  life,  already  enter  upon  the  timeless  completeness 
and  perfection  of  the  world-will  itself.^  By  the  negation  in 
his  will  of  the  defect  and  the  illusion  that  he  finds  in  his  own 
life  and  in  the  lives  of  others,  and  of  the  sin  and  sorrow  that 
are  in  the  world,  he  can  enter  upon  the  affirmation  of  complete 
and  perfect  life. 

.4  proiws  of  ethical  evolution,  the  idea  of  man's  life  as  will, 
as  something  that  is  essentially  hecoming  rather  than  anything 
that  actually  is,  affords  a  valuable  corrective  to  many  of  the 
notorious  difficulties  of  the  Hegelian  metaphysic  of  reality. 
It  is  quite  in  the  spirit  of  Hegel's  dialectic,  or  of  the  philosophy 
of  the  idea  in  general,  that  a  so-called  higher  point  of  view 
about  the  world  or  the  life  of  man  should  actually  supplant  or 
remove  altogether  a  so-called  lower  or  inferior  point  of  view. 
In  the  different  stages  of  Hegel's  'Logic,'  and  in  the  transi- 
tions from  one  part  of  his  system  to  another,  we  generally  find 
that  a  lower  category  tends  to  disappear  altogether  into  a 
higher  category :  rcciprocitg,  for  example,  is  made  to  supplant 

^  '•  Unci  ob  alles  in  ewigen  Wechsel  kreist,  .  __„ 

Es  behanet  im  AVeclinel  ein  ruhiger  Geist." 

— '  Die  "Worte  des  Glaubens,'  Schiller. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE  SYSTEM.  509 

t 
causation,  and  the  syllof;lsm  to  supplant  the  judgment,  and  the 

object  the  syllogism,  and  finally  the  Idea  is  made  to  supplant 
the  object ;  and  then  finally  the  Idea  becomes  all  in  all.  And 
in  the  same  spirit  the  philosophy  of  religion  is  practically 
made  to  take  the  place  of  or  to  supplant  concrete  religious 
feeling,  and  philosophy  is  made  to  supplant  science,  and 
science  is  made  to  supplant  common-sense.  Now  this  whole 
tendency  is  lacking  in  a  true  regard  for  reality,  for  the  reality 
ot  ordinary  things  and  the  facts  of  ordinary  life. 

It  is  all  very  well  to  idealise  life  and  reality  in  the  way 
that  Hegel  seeks  to  do,  and  actually  to  pass  in  one's  thought 
from  a  lower  to  a  higher  point  of  view  about  things.  But  the 
idea  cannot  be  made  to  win  its  conquest  over  the  world  so 
easily.  As  a  human  being  the  philosopher  or  the  idealist  has 
to  discharge  the  ordinary  duties  of  life  like  his  less-gifted 
fellows ;  he  cannot  afford  to  neglect  these  in  his  thought  or 
to  allow  himself  to  think  himself  superior  to  the  concrete  per- 
formances of  duty  merely  because  he  understands  everything 
in  idea.^  Just  as  the  artist  can  never  utterly  get  rid  of  the 
laws  of  physical  science  which  determine  the  way  in  which 
objects  appear  to  the  eye  of  the  percipient,  nor  the  chemical 
laws  which  determine  the  possible  combinations  that  he  may 
make  of  his  colours ;  so  the  philosopher  or  the  genius  can 
never  completely  eliminate  or  abolish  the  lower  or  the  material 
aspects  of  reality,  or  ignore  the  fact  of  his  being  surrounded 
by  people  who  may  not  be  his  own  equals  or  the  fact  of  his 
own  material  or  economic  wants.  The  whole  problem  of 
ordinary  life — of  life  id  bas,  as  the  French  say — consists  in 
the  continual  effort  to  mould  the  lower  aspects  of  life  in  con- 
formity with  the  higher.     As  a  matter  of  fact,  the  ideal  or  the 

^  I  am  thinking  of  instances  in  whicli  well-known  men  of  genius  have  often 
set  at  naught  several  of  the  established  rules  of  society.  I  am  not  criticising 
such  procedure,  but  merely  pointing  out  the  fact  that  they  have  to  recognise  the 
existence  of  ordinary  obligations  and  duties.  Going  to  the  polls  to  vote  in  a 
municipal  election  would  be  such  a  duty. 


510  Schopenhauer's  system. 

psychical  never  wholly  supplants  the  material  or  the  physical. 
We  know  perfectly  well  that  our  physical  wants  subject  us 
to  the  physical  laws  of  the  universe,  and  also  that  the  scien- 
tific aspects  of  reality  continue  to  exist  alongside  of  both 
natural  and  artistic  beauty.  Owing  to  Miis,  philosophy  has 
continually  to  justify  its  existence  over  against  that  of  science, 
and  religion  to  justify  its  existence  over  against  both  mere 
philosophy  and  mere  secularism.  And  this  is  so  just  because 
life  is  ivill,  because  the  life  of  man  is  a  struggle  which  is  not 
blest  with  the  possibility  of  victory  until  its  close. 

The  different  planes  of  reality,  or  the  different  grades  of 
the  will,  in  the  language  of  Schopenhauer,  do  not  completely 
pass  over  into  each  other  or  disappear  into  each  other  so  easily 
as  in  Hegel  being  passes  into  hccoming  or  recvprocity  into  the 
notion,  nor  as  nature  passes  into  thought.  The  world  ever  remains 
before  us  as  a  plexus  or  tissue  of  all  the  different  kinds  of  force 
that  are  exemplified  in  it,  of  physical  and  chemical  and  organic 
as  well  as  of  purely  psychical  energy.  The  lower  planes  of 
experience — the  natural  and  physical  aspects  of  reality — may 
indeed  seem  to  philosophy  to  have  their  meaning  only  in  view 
of  the  higher  (as  even  matter  and  causality,  for  example,  are 
to  a  certain  extent  psychical  phenomena) ;  but  they  do  not 
altogether  disappear  into  the  psychical  and  the  ideal,  just 
because  the  world  is  will  and  not  idea.  The  world  as  we 
know  it  is  to  a  large  extent  the  stage  of  a  struggle  between 
the  real  and  the  ideal.  Because  man's  life  is  essentially  will 
it  cannot  be  spiritualised  away  into  the  "  pale  moonlight "  of 
the  idea ;  what  man  wants  is  not  ethereality  but  an  organism 
which  shall  be  equal  to  the  highest  aspirations  of  his  rational 
will.  Once  again,  it  is  true  that  Schopenhauer  himself 
generally  relapses  into  a  pantheism  of  the  will,  just  as  Hegel 
did  into  that  of  the  idea,  but  he  ought  not  to  have  done  this. 
When  he  did  so  he  took  for  his  type  of  will  not  the  complete 
will  that  man  is  developing  in  the  moral  and  intellectual  life, 


THE  POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE  SYSTEM.  511 

but  the  fictitious  thing  called  mere  potency  or  mere  temlency, 
which  is  really  mere  nothing,  or  at  least  just  the  same  as 
nothing.  When  he  did  so  he  fell  back  into  an  imaginary 
physical  evolutionism,  an  imaginary  evolution  of  the  higher 
from  the  lower  in  point  of  time,  of  the  ideal  from  the  material. 
And  as  we  have  said,  he  was  so  good  a  disciple  of  Kant  that 
he  ought  to  have  been  above  this. 

Schopenhauer  always  remained  something  of  an  idealist  in 
the  sense  that  he  could  never  quite  believe  the  reality  of  things 
to  be  just  what  it  seemed  to  be.  Now  while  this  belief  is 
to  a  certain  extent  justifiable,  tliere  is  something  exceedingly 
dangerous  about  it.^  The  perception  of  this  danger  is  the  per- 
ception of  Schopenhauer's  limitations  and  of  the  limitatit)ns  of 
idealism  and  illusionism  generally.  All  idealism  is  apt  to  lead 
to  pessimism.  Schopenhauer's  pessimism  is  due  to  an  excess  on 
his  part  of  the  idealistic  temperament.  Idealism,  in  questioning 
the  reality  of  things,  even  of  the  so-called  lower  and  material 
aspects  of  the  world,  tends  to  cut  away  any  real  foothold  that 
it  might  have  upon  reality.  In  questioning  things  it  may 
come  in  the  end  to  despair  of  the  reality  even  of  subjective 
facts — of  human  experience,  of  the  thoughts  and  volitions  of 
men.  We  can  see  this  tendency  to  lose  hold  upon  palpable 
reality  through  straining  after  something  supposedly  higher 
than  ordinary  reality  in  the  case  of  the  idealism  of  religion. 
The  consistent  Koman  Catholic,  for  instance,  is  necessarily 
to  a  large  extent — in  so  far  as  he  is  now  forced  to  give 
up  the  idea  of  the  "  temporal  supremacy  "  of  his  Church — 
a  political  pessimist ;  he  believes,  or  he  ought  to  believe, 
that  the  present  world  is  actually  going  to  "  rack  and  ruin  " 
because  it  does  not  present  to  him  the  realisation  of  the 
religious  ideal  in  which  he  believes.  The  absolutist  or  idealist, 
in  fact,  in  whatever  shape  we  find  him,  is  always  apt  to  have 

'  Cf.  chap.  ii.  ;  also  pp.  275,  449,  &c. 


512  Schopenhauer's  system. 

a  despairing  ^  hold  upon  reality  :  he  takes  it  all  to  be  illusory  in 
so  far  as  it  does  not  fit  in  to  his  idea,  whatever  that  may 
happen  to  be.  It  takes  very  little  of  the  historical  spirit  to 
put  all  ideas  and  all  ideal  systems  on  the  same  footing,  as 
being  all  of  them  inadequate  attempts  to  grasp  the  world  as  a 
whole,  suggestive  enough  at  a  given  time  but  one-sided  and 
unreal.  Unless  the  idealist  is  something  of  a  realist,  unless 
he  has  a  firm  grasp  on  some  real  which  he  wants  to  idealise, 
he  is  of  necessity  always  verging  into  illusionism. 

Schopenhauer  was  a  man  who  had  been  spoiled  by  philo- 
sophical idealism,  and  was  struggling  vainly,  struggling  with 
all  the  energy  of  his  passionate  and  powerful  nature,  to  get  to 
reality.  Plato  cast  his  spell  upon  him  in  his  youth  and  made 
him  feel  the  whole  world  to  be  alien  and  foreign  to  spiritual 
will.  There  really  never  was  anything  very  home-like  about 
the  world  for  the  young  Schopenhauer ;  and  Plato  and  Kant 
gave  him  intellectual  grounds  for  believing  that  it  never  could 
be  home-like  to  the  human  spirit.  The  idealists  of  his  day 
only  made  him  angry  with  their  extravagances,  and  so  matters 
always  went  from  bad  to  worse  with  him.  The  anthropologist 
might  summarily  characterise  Schopenhauer's  personality  as 
representing  simply  the  effort  to  struggle  through  idealism  to 
reality.  He  would  not  by  this  be  doing  complete  justice  to 
Schopenhauer,  but  he  would  not  be  travelling  in  a  wrong 
direction.  Much  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  is  simply 
devoted  to  portraying  the  efforts  of  an  imperfect  idealism 
to  get  to  reality.     It  is  a  great  lesson  to  learn  from  Scho- 

^  "Scepticism  brought  me  at  one  time  to  a  condition  nearly  bordering  on 
frenzy.  I  had  the  idea  that  besides  myself  nobody  and  nothing  existed  in  the 
whole  world ;  that  things  were  not  things,  but  presentations,  which  became 
phenomenal  only  at  what  time  I  directed  my  attention  to  them,  and  that  these 
presentations  disappeared  at  once  when  I  ceased  to  think  of  them.  .  .  .  Tliere 
were  hours  when,  under  the  influence  of  this  fixed  idea,  I  came  to  such  a  pitch  of 
mental  bewilderment,  that  I  at  times  looked  quickly  the  other  way,  in  the  hope 
that  in  the  place  where  I  was  not,  I  might  be  surprised  by  nothingness." — Tolstoi, 
as  quoted  from  Lowenfeld  by  Nordau,  'Degeneration,'  p.  166. 


THE   POSITIVE   ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  513 

penhauer  that  all  idealism  has  a  tendency  to  pessimism  just 
because  it  naturally  tends  to  illusionism.  And  of  course  this 
means  that  all  johilosophy  has  a  tendency  to  pessimism,  because 
idealism  is  such  an  integral  element  in  all  philosophy.  Ileal- 
ism  rarely  leads  to  pessimism.  People  who  face  the  tragic 
side  of  life  all  their  lives  through  are  rarely  pessimistic.  No 
one,  in  fact,  who  works  hard  can  be  pessimistic.  Such  a 
man  tends  to  believe  in  goodness  almost  in  spite  of  himself. 
Human  nature  has  a  wonderful  amount  of  recuperative  power 
and  positive  vitality  about  it,  Kealism  does  not  necessarily 
mean  materialism ;  it  means  only  a  belief  in  the  philosophy 
of  action  and  energy  and  function  and  achievement.  The 
study  of  action  is  healthful  benuse  it  brings  to  the  mind  the 
sense  of  free  energy  and  consequently  of  pleasure  and  of  hope  ; 
while  the  study  of  mere  thought,  in  so  far  as  it  is  unnatural,  is 
unhealthful — is  apt  to  spoil  a  man's  sense  for  reality. 

It  has  been  said  that  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  occupies 
itself  largely  with  the  contradictions  or  the  illusionism  and 
the  discrepancy  that  are  in  things.  There  is  an  element  of 
contradiction  in  experience,  and  even  if  that  be  only  apparent 
and  not  real,  the  very  contemplation  of  it,  the  effort  to  sur- 
mount it  in  one's  thought,  is  apt  to  engender  a  feeling  of 
illusion.  "  Life  oscillates  like  a  pendulum  from  left  to  right, 
from  pain  to  ennui."  The  whole  philosophy  of  the  concept  is 
apt  to  "  sickly  things  over  "  with  the  "  pale  cast  of  thought," 
and  so  to  make  them  lose  their  apparent  and  manifest  reality. 
The  greatest  of  all  contradictions  in  experience  is  the  contra- 
diction between  what  is  apparent  and  what  is  real,  the  search 
that  constitutes  life  and  that  which  the  search  really  brings. 
It  is  this  upon  which  Schopenhauer  especially  fastens  his 
attention.  He  found  things  illusory  because  they  were  not 
what  they  seemed  to  be.  But  this  was  mainly  because  he 
did  not  take  a  firmer  hold  upon  his  own  philosophy  of  will. 

2  K 


514  Schopenhauer's  system. 

He  ought  to  have  detected  and  followed  up  the  reality,  the 
definite  reality,  that  the  will  is  manifestly  seeking  in  its 
toilsome  ascent  through  creation  and  in  the^  totality  of  its 
manifestations.  He  was  unable  to  do  this  because  he  always 
fastened  his  attention  upon  the  many  things  that  merely  enter 
into  life  for  a  time  without  filling  it  up  or  really  constituting 
it  as  a  whole.  Indeed  nothing  is  calculated  to  satisfy  the 
aspiration  and  effort  of  man  but  the  very  fact  of  a  rounded 
and  perfect  life.  This  is  really  attained  in  the  regenerated 
spiritual  volition  of  which  Schopenhauer  himself  has  made  us 
think  so  much. 

It  is  very  easy  to  fall  into  illusionism  if  we  do  not  keep  a 
firm  hold  of  the  fact  that  life  is  manifestly  an  end  in  itself, 
as  itself  greater  than  all  the  things  which  enter  into  it.  An 
ardent  young  disciple  of  von  Hartmann's,  for  instance,  ex- 
claims :  "  Life  feeds  us  with  illusions.  "We  simply  stagger  on 
from  one  deception  to  another  and  keep  on  hoping  to  obtain 
happiness ;  .  .  .  but  happiness  seems  only  to  fioat  away  from 
our  eyes,  hope  to  be  as  illusory  as  the  objects  to  which  it 
attaches  itself :  '  the  only  thing  which  remains  to  us  as  the 
object  of  hope  is  not  the  greatest  possible  happiness  but  the 
least  possible  unhappiness.'  '  The  result  of  the  life  of  the 
individual  is  thus  that  one  turns  away  from  everything,  that 
one  finds  with  Koheleth  everything  to  be  "vanity" — i.e., 
illusion,  nothing.' "  ^ 

Tliis  is  quite  convincing  about  the  illusoriness  of  the  mere 
momentary  pursuits  as  opposed  to  the  permanent  interests  and 
realities  of  life.  It  is  true  both  to  the  spirit  and  the  letter  of 
Schopenhauer,  who  writes  scores  of  pages  in  the  same  strain. 
The  proper  conclusion,  however,  to  draw  from  the  illusory  char- 
acter of  many  particular  things  and  many  particular  pursuits 
is  not  that  we  ought  to  seek  such  a  negative  thing  as  the  least 

1  Dr  Arthur  Drews,  '  E.  v.  Hartmann's  Thilosophie  und  der  Materialismus  in 
der  modernen  Kultur,'  s.  29. 


THE   POSITIVE    ASPECTS    OF   THE   SYSTEM.  515 

amount  of  pain,  but  that  we  ought  to  fall  back  upon  the  fact  of 
life  as  that  of  which  pleasure  and  pain  are  both  a  mere  index. 
The  regenerated  and  ideal  will  finds  all  things  in  the  world 
to  be  new  and  full  of  significance,  because  they  are  approached 
in  the  proper  spirit.  One  of  the  many  inconsistent  things  about 
Schopenhauer  is  that  he  seems  to  recognise  this  himself  per- 
fectly well.  "  So  far  as  enjoyment  is  concerned,  the  average 
man  is  dependent  upon  things  which  are  outside  liimself, — 
possessions,  rank,  wife  and  children,  friends,  society,  and  so  on. 
Upon  these  things  he  builds  his  happiness  in  life :  it  conse- 
quently falls  with  these  when  he  loses  them  or  when  he  finds 
himself  deceived  in  them.  We  might  express  his  condition  by 
saying  that  his  centre  of  gravity  falls  outside  himself.  This  is 
whr  his  wishes  and  desires  change  so  much.  He  will — if  his 
means  allow  it — purchase  country  houses  and  horses,  give 
banquets,  undertake  journeys,  and  in  general  go  in  for  great 
extravagance.  He  does  all  this  because  he  is  seeking  in  every 
conceivable  way  external  happiness,  just  as  an  invalid  hopes 
through  the  use  of  consommds  and  drugs  to  attain  to  health 
and  vigour,  which  does  not  come  from  these  things  at  all,  but 
from  general  vital  power.  Let  us  place  beside  this  man — 
not  to  go  to  the  very  opposite  extreme — another  man,  not  of 
great  capacity,  but  still  of  capacity  slightly  above  the  average ; 
we  will  find  this  man  working  as  a  dilettante  at  some  fine  art 
or  devoting  himself  to  a  positive  science,  like  botany,  or  miner- 
alogy, physics,  astronomy,  or  history,  and  finding  in  this  a  great 
'  portion  of  his  happiness,  and  gaining  fresh  strength  from  it 
when  the  external  sources  of  his  happiness  have  come  to  an 
end  or  do  not  satisfy  him  any  more.  We  are  warranted  in 
saying  that  the  centre  of  gravity  of  such  a  man  falls  partly 
loithin  himself."  ^ 

When  reading  such  a  passage  as  this,  we  find  that  Schop- 
enhauer is  a  wise  man  in  spite  of  himself,  that  he  seems  really 
1  "Von  Dem,  was  Einer  ist."    Werke,  v,  368. 


516  schopenhauer'8  system. 

to  have  a  finn  hold  upon  life.^  But  (as  so  often  happens)  if 
we  read  further  on  in  the  same  place,'^  we  find  him  falling  inU) 
that  excess  of  subjectivity  and  idealism  which  is  the  pre- 
vailing weakness  of  his  whole  system.  He  goes  on  to  describe 
how,  after  all,  the  greatest  satisfaction  in  life  falls  to  the  lot 
only  of  the  man  of  extraordinary  genius  (the  being  who  is  so 
dear  to  him "') :  he  is  the  only  man  whose  "  centre  of  gravit/i/ 
reallif  falls  within  himself"  seeing  that  he  of  ull  men  is  least 
dependent  upon  what  is  outside  himself.  Such  a  man,  he 
says,  takes  continual  delight  in  occupying  himself  simply 
with  his  own  thoughts,  and  so  finds  the  supreme  good  in  the 
free  enjoyment  of  leisure  and  the  free  sense  of  his  own  power 
and  capacity.  Now,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  the  merely  contem- 
plative genius  fails  to  realise  the  meaning  of  life.  It  is  only 
the  genius  of  action,  the  genius  who  creates  what  enters 
into  the  lives  of  other  men  than  himself,  that  is  really 
happy ;  it  is  only  he  who  sets  forth  bv  his  works  the  real 
significance  of  human  achievement.  Vv'e  have  seen  this  in 
dealing  with  the  question  of  artistic  production.  It  is  only 
by  relating  the  idea  to  the  will,  the  ideal  to  the  real,  thought 
to  action,  that  we  can  make  life  cease  to  wear  the  illusorj' 
character  which  it  seems  to  wear  in  the  hands  of  a  superficial 
or  exclusively  intellectual  philosophy. 

It  is  to  the  spirit  of  cHticism  * — the  spirit  of  the  Kantian 
philosophy — that  we  must  look  if  we  would  be  delivered  from 

^  Cf.  "  Now  it  is  <  erfvin  that  notliiiig  contributes  more  to  serenity  than  health, 
and  nothing  less  than  riches." — Werke,  v.  343  ;  Parerga,  "Von  ilein.  was  Kiner 
iat." 

And  again  :  "  Hence  it  is  that  subjective  goods,  a  noble  character,  mental 
ability,  a  happy  temperament,  a  well-constituted,  thoroughly  healthy  body — in 
short,  viens  sana  in  corporc  sano — are  among  the  ni-st  important  conditions  of 
happiness.  We  ought  to  think  much  more  about  the  promotion  and  development 
of  these  things  than  of  the  possession  of  wealth  and  external  honours." — Ibid.,  342. 

"^  Werke,  v.  359  ;  Parerga,  "  Von  dem,  was  Einer  ist." 

^  He  was  very  fond  of  quoting  the  words  of  Goethe,  "  Nur  die  Lumpe  sind 
bescheiden."  ••  Of.  svpra,  p.  8. 


THE  POSITIVE  ASPECTS   OF  THE   SYSTEM.  517 

the  extremes  of  optimism  and  pessimism.  Botli  optimism  and 
pessimism  are  simply  states  of  mind  incident  to  the  process  of 
distinguishing  and  accepting  and  rejecting,  affirming  and  deny- 
ing, which  goes  on  in  the  search  of  the  individual  for  what  is 
real  and  objective  as  opposed  to  what  is  illusory  and  subjective, 
— in  his  search  for  a  plane  of  reality  upon  which  he  may  build 
the  creations  of  his  life.  There  is  comfort  in  the  very  fact 
that  pessimism  is  more  an  affair  of  the  intellect  than  of  the  will, 
for  it  is  in  the  will  that  the  reality  of  man's  life  is  to  be  found. 
Pessimism  really  arises  only  from  erroneous  estimates  of  life. 
In  making  out  life  to  be  an  affair  of  the  will,  and  so  an  end  in 
itself — something  that  is  greater  than  all  our  mere  descriptions 
of  it — Schopenhauer  has  broken  the  back  of  his  own  illusionism. 
The  supreme  contradiction,  after  all,  in  Schopenhauer's 
system  is  the  confusion  that  it  exhibits  between  the  critical 
and  the  dogmatical  methods  of  philosophising.  If  Schopen- 
hauer had  simply  adapted  the  critical  way  of  looking  at  life, 
of  signalising  definitely  and  distinguishing  clearly  from  one 
another  the  different  points  of  view  from  which  it  can  be 
regarded,  he  would  not  have  fallen  into  so  much  absurd  dog- 
matism about  non-existence  being  better  than  existence.  The 
very  notion  of  non-existence,  of  non-being,  is  simply  a  hasty 
generalisation  from  the  fact  of  contradiction  and  illusion. 
The  contradictions  or  illusions  in  life  are  apt  to  make  one 
think  that  non-being  is  really  preferable  to  being.  But  the 
difficulty  of  thinking  that  which  is  hard  of  comprehension  and 
not  easily  assigned  to  its  true  place  in  the  context  of  our  ex- 
perience, does  uot  warrant  us  in  taking  a  negative  view  of  the 
whole  of  human  life.  As  has  been  said  by  philosophers,^  the 
category  of  non-being  does  not  belong  to  thiiigs  at  all ;  it  is  only 
an  invention  of  the  intellect  to  enable  us  to  think  quickly — 

^  See,  e.g.,  Bradley,  'The  Principles  of  Logic'  (Book  I.  chap,  iii.)  Lotze,  in 
his  '  Logic '  (transl.  Clarendon  Press),  sets  forth  the  relation  of  notions  (positive 
and  negative)  to  reality. 


518  Schopenhauer's  system. 

to  pass  away  from  what  is  really  contradictory ;  it  belongs,  in 
other  words,  to  the  idea,  not  to  the  will. 

Th(i  sense  of  disenchantment  and  illusion  and  error  is  in- 
cident to  the  very  fact  of  search  and  of  life,  of  life  as  a  search 
after  better  life.     Life,  however,  would  not  be  sought  at  all 
were  it  not  for  the  fact  that  slowly  in  the  experience  of  the 
individual    and   of   the    race   a   liigher  consciousness   of  the 
realities  of  personal  and  social  life  is  ever  dawning  upon  the 
human   race.      In  this   higher  consciousness  and  the  higher- 
effort  of  which  it  is  the  reflex  resides  the  reality  of  life,  the 
reality  upon  which  the  reality  of   all  other   things    depends. 
All  other  things  are  in  themselves  illusory  in  comparison  with 
this  supreme   fact.     5ut   fortunately  things  do  not  exist  i7i 
themselves ;  life,  in  other  words,  is  not  a  sum  of  momentary 
experiences,  as  the  Cyrenaics  thought.     The  hardest  contra- 
diction in  life,  as  has  already  been  suggested,  arises  out  of  the 
fact  that  we  must  think  as  well  as  act.     It  is  true  that  our 
bodies  have  been  wound  up  by  nature  to  discharge  certain 
functions  and  so  to  commit  us  to  the  pursuit  of  certain  definite 
ends ;   and  it  is  true  that  our  mental  health  seems  to  a  very 
large   extent   to    depend   upon    the   kind   of  bodily  organisa- 
tion we  inherit  from  our  progenitors.     But,  in  virtue  of  our 
intellect,  new  motives  to  live  are  continually  awakened  within 
us,  which  may  in  their   turn  effect  a   reorganisation  of  our 
whole  natural  system  of   instincts  and  impulses.     When  we 
are  weary  with  the  struggle  of  life  we  are  apt  to  think  that 
the  lives  of  beings  who  are  not  cursed   with  the   power  of 
human  thought  are  more  happy  and  free  than  our  own ;  but 
nature  and  history  and  society  bring  us  ever  and  anew  under 
the  influence  of  forces  for  the  uplifting  of  our  lives,  forces  - 
which  exercise  power  over  us  in  spite  of  our  individual  weak- 
ness and  indifference.     The  key-note  of  our  lives  is  will  and 
the  eternal  effort  to  will. 

It  is  an  old  story  that  our  very  finitude  means  our  being 


THE   POSITIVE    ASPECTS   OF   THE  SYSTEM.  519 

subjected  to  suffering  and  defeat  and  pain.  Schopenhauer  is 
by  no  means  the  only  man  who  has  insisted  on  the  fact  that 
pain  is  necessarily  bound  up  with  life,  although  he  is  decidedly 
original  in  the  extreme  vehemence  with  which  he  proclaims 
this  fact.  He  has  compelled  us  all  to  think  the  fact  of  pain 
and  suffering  along  with  the  fact  of  volition  and  the  struggle 
for  life.  In  explaining  life  he  often  seems  as  one-sided  in  one 
way  as  Hegel  is  in  another.  He  always  seems  to  be  explaining 
the  higher  by  the  lower,  while  Hegel  is  always  explaining  the 
lower  by  the  higher.  But  we  must  not  go  outside  the  fact  of 
life  in  our  efforts  to  explain  it,  nor  keep  our  attention  fastened 
only  on  some  of  its  phases  to  the  neglect  of  other  phases. 
We  can  never  say  why  the  world  should  be  so  and  so,  why  the 
will  should  have  done  just  as  it  has  done,  and  not  differently. 
We  know,  indeed,  that  nothing  could  be  different  unless  the 
whole  universe  were  different.  The  inexplicability  of  life  is 
just  the  inexplicability  of  all  willing.  We  cannot  "  learn  to 
will " — velle  non  discitur.  And  so  the  only  explanation  of  life 
is  the  fact  of  life  itself.  A  clear  consciousness  of  the  fact 
of  life  is  an  indispensable  condition  of  all  rational  knowledge 
of  the  meaning  of  life. 


*o 


In  this  final  recurrence  to  the  fact  of  life  itself  as  that  alone 
which  philosophy  enables  us  in  a  measure  to  understand,  we 
have  come  to  a  point  where  we  may  well  take  leave  of  Schopen- 
hauer with  one  or  two  general  observations.  The  positive 
suggestiveness  of  Schopenhauer  lies  in  the  reality  and  the 
breadth  and  the  expansiveness  of  the  fact  of  volition.  A 
positive  philosophy,  indeed,  has  always  an  unlimited  scope 
on  its  own  ground,  whatever  that  may  be ;  its  only  limitations 
arise  from  the  fact  of  its  own  possible  tendency  to  call  all 
philosophy  negative  which  has  preceded  itself,  and  everything 
illusory  which  is  hard  to  comprehend.  In  this  respect  Scho- 
penhauer and  Comte  are  in  accord. 


520  Schopenhauer's  system.      .: 

Pessimism  is  partly  the  result  of  refusing  to  convert  any 
Icnowledge  we  may  have  of  the  ideal  into  certain  science. 
Schopenhauer  exemplifies  this  attitude.  He  said  that  a 
philosophy,  to  be  serious,  must  be  pessimistic,  must  defty  the 
reality  of  much  that  appears,  and  the  possibility  of  giving  a 
rational  explanation  of  the  world.  We  have  found  that  it 
needs  a  much  more  serious  philosophy  to  be  optimistic  than 
to  be  pessimistic.  If  we  are  in  earnest  in  our  study  of  the 
real,  we  shall  detect  the  poi,itive  achievement  that  runs 
through  all  the  tentative  efforts  of  the  life  of  man.  In  so  far 
as  this  involves  the  necessity  of  a  direct  attitude  to  reality, 
Schopenhauer  has  thrust  upon  philosophy  the  duty  of  recon- 
sidering everything  in  idealism  which  seems  to  suggest  that 
we  have  not  in  our  experience  a  direct  knowledge  of  reality. 
We  have  tried  to  indicate  the  direct  knowledge  that  we  have 
of  reality  in  will.  This  of  course  may  be  questioned ;  but  if 
so,  and  if  we  fall  back  upon  idealism  (uncritical  idealism), 
we  shall  find  it  excessively  difficult  to  get  rid  of  illusionism. 
If,  indeed,  our  experience  of  reality  is  not  direct  but  indirect, 
there  is  before  us  nothing  but  illusionism.  We  may  learn, 
then,  from  Schopenhauer  that  it  is  at  least  a  desirable  thing 
to  cultivate  a  direct  knowledge  of  life.^  With  a  view  to 
this  it  is  desirable  to  develop  to  the  full  all  our  suscepti- 
bilities and  capacities,  and  this  is  expressed  in  Schopenhauer's 
idea  that  the  proper  way  of  approaching  reality  is  through 
wiU. 

^  That  the  world  is  at  least  learning  this  lesson  a«  it  applies  to  the  very 
highest  ideas  and  ideals  of  humanity,  may  be  seen  from  many  contemporary 
movements.  It  may  not  be  learning  this  from  Schopenhauer ;  our  point 
is  only  that  it  might  be  doi.'ig  so.  This  may  be  eeen  from  the  appeal  to  the 
practical  reason  and  the  actual  development  of  life  itself  contained  in  the  follow- 
ing quotation  from  a  well-known  brochure  of  one  of  the  leaders  in  what  has  been 
called  the  "New  Idealistic  Movement"  in  France:  "  S'appuyant  sur  la  Raison 
pratique  de  Kant,  ils  r«Spdteront  2i  tous  que  Valium  bonne  ^.claircit  scide  les  doutes 
de  I'esprit  .  .  .  que  la  foi  est  purement  et  simplement  la  conscience  en  nous  de 
notre  progress  moral,  graduelle  comme  lui,  et  qui  elle  en  est  la  recompense." — 
M.  Paul  Desjardins,  '  Le  Devoir  present,'  p.  68. 


THE   POSITIVE  ASPECTS   OF   THE   SYSTEM.  521 

The  study  of   Schopenhauer's   system  and  its   fate  in  the 
present  century  shows  how  desirable  it  is  to  study  the  history 
of  philosophy  in  connection  with  the  whole  natural  and  spiritual 
development  of  mankind.     The  history  of  philosophy,  as  is  often 
said,  is  the  history  of  civilisation.     We  do  not  intend  by  this 
to  deny  the  existence  of  that  part  of  philosophy  that  is  called 
metapbysic.     Metaphysic,  on  the  contrary,  represents  a  per- 
manent necessity  of  the  human  mind  to  relate  together  all 
that  it  is  supposed  to  know  and  to  experience  about  reality. 
One  of  the  important  indirect  services  of  Schopenhauer,  indeed, 
is  to  have  turned  the  attention  of  students  of  philosophy  to 
Kant,  where  metaphysic  is  found  in  its   strictest  and  most 
abstract  and  most  unadorned  form.     Only  we  find  in  Schopen- 
hauer so  many  practical  difficulties  in  carrying  out  the  dis- 
tinction upon  which  Kant  insisted  between  the  apparent  and 
the  real,  that  we  learn  to  treat  this  distinction  as  relative  and 
not  as  absolute.     The  reality  of  things  is  what  it  appears  to 
be  in  rational  volition.     The  best  corrective  to  the  prejudice 
which  we  are  almost  certain  to  have  inherited  and  to  brin^ 
to  philosophy  with  us — the  idea  that  philosophy  is  going  to 
reveal  the  hidden  reality  of  things  to  us — is  to  be  found  in 
taking  up  the  direct  attitude  to  reality  incident  to  the  study 
of  philosophy  as  itself  vitally  connected  with  the  whole  mei«hal 
and  natural  development  of  mankind. 


522 


EPILOGUE. 

It  is  no  adequate  characterisation  of  Schopenhauer's  philosophy 
to  call  it  pessimism.  There  are  many  reasons  for  this.  The 
word  has,  to  begin  with,  particular  associations  antithetical 
to  optimism,  and  it  is  certain  that  Schopenhauer  himself 
attached  quite  as  much  importance  to  the  positive  aspects  of 
his  system  as  to  the  negative.  Even  if  he  had  thought  of  its 
negative  aspects,  he  would  have  held  that  it  was  negative  c»f  a 
far  broader  thing  than  optimism — to  wit,  of  the  whole  philo- 
sophy of  the  concept.  He  never  wavered  in  his  conviction 
that  he  was  one  of  the  great  positive  philosophers  of  the  world, 
having  shown  forth  more  clearly  than  any  one  else  the  inmost 
nature  of  reality.  He  rarely  uses  the  word  pessimism, — per- 
haps three  or  four  times  in  all — and  then  only  about  the 
philosophy  of  others,  and  generally  in  the  adjective  form  as 
opposed  to  an  optimistic  view  of  things.  He  often  enough 
left  it  to  be  inferred  that  his  own  philosophy  was  pessimistic,  ■ 
but  the  truth  is  that  it  is  simply  a  general  illusionism  about 
life  and  reality,  a  general  illusionism  resting  upon  the  conten- 
tion— which  he  proves,  at  least,  to  his  own  satisfaction — that 
both  life  and  reality  are  essentially  different  from  what  they 
are  generally  taken  to  be. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy,  again,  is  in  a  sense  greater  than 
pessimism,  just  as  pessimism  is  in  a  sense  greater  than  it :  .1 
it  is  greater  than   pessimism,   because   pessimism  cannot   be 
more  than  a  mere  corollary  from  a  philosophy  of  reality — 


''  EPILOGUE.  •■  523 

it  is  not  itself  a  philosophy  of  reality ;  and  pessimism  is 
greater  than  Schopenhauer's  philosophy,  because  no  pessimism 
can  be  thorough-going  which  does  not  try  to  show  that  the 
outcome  of  human  history  as  well  as  that  of  the  cosmic 
process  is  essentially  negative.  The  former  fact  is  what  we 
should  think  of  here.  •  -    sv     a 

'  Eeflection  upon  the  attitude  of  the  European  mind  of  this 
century  towards  Schopenhauer's  philosophy  helps  to  confirm  us 
in  the  idea  of  it  as  essentially  illusionism.  It  really  began  to 
take  hold  of  the  minds  of  men  only  when  they  were  to  a  great 
extent  unable  to  reckon  with  the  world  and  with  the  problems 
of  their  time.  And  wherever  this  state  of  matters  is  re- 
peated, as  it  is  just  now  in  what  is  called  Fin-de-Sidele-ism,^ 
there  again  does  Schopenhauer  obtain  a  hearing.  It  is  always 
perhaps  some  of  the  finer  spirits  of  a  people  or  a  country 
(Schopenhauer's  influence  has  spread  from  England  and  Ger- 
many through  France  and  Italy  to  Eussia  and  America  ^)  who 
are  first  impressed  by  Schopenhauer ;  but  this  is  partly  be- 

^  Cf .  M.  Nordau  in  '  Degeneration, '  passim. 

^  Schopenhauer  commands  a  hearing  in  most  civilised  countries,  not  only 
because  his  philosophy  is  a  study  of  the  Wdtschmerz  that  we  all  feel  at  times, 
but  also  because  he  reflects  in  his  personality  and  style  some  of  the  pronounced 
characteristics  of  different  national  types.  He  has  from  his  ancestry  the  pride 
and  the  aggi-essiveness  of  the  Dutch  mercantile  spirit  of  t^  t  seventeenth  century, 
the  depth  (Ticfc)  of  the  German  nature  and  (in  his  style)  the  fascination  and 
inwardness  {Innigkcit)  of  the  German  language  ;  the  consummate  worldliness 
and  the  gaicti  of  the  Frenchman  and  the  esprit  of  the  literary  tmmncipi!^  of  the 
ij'claircisscment  period ;  something  of  the  silent  fury  of  the  Englishman  (he  was 
at  an  English  school  for  a  short  time,  and,  when  travelling,  generally  fraternised 
with  Englishmen),  and  of  his  belief  in  the  maintenance  of  physical  vigour  and  of 
his  contempt  for  irrelevant  issues  ;  and  what  he  himself  called  the  shamelessness 
of  the  Italian.  And  thei'e  are  other  piquant  things  about  the  man.  He  is  the 
stylist  of  the  German  philosophers,  hating  the  obscurity  of  German  metaphysics  ; 
he  knew  Spanish  ;  he  had  a  profound  feeling  for  Indian  mysticism ;  he  was  a 
good  deal  of  a  moqueur  at  all  the  foibles  of  humanity — foibles  national,  social, 
sexual,  professional — foibles  belonging  to  the  different  periods  of  life  ;  and  he  is 
always  spirituel.  His  faults  are  all  due  to  the  fact  that  his  intellect,  and  his 
feeling,  and  his  will,  were  all  developed  to  so  unusual  a  degiee,  that  they  could 
not  be  brought  into  harmony  with  each  other.  He  is  a  Titan  wrestling  with  the 
problem  of  life. 


524  Schopenhauer's  system. 

cause  it  is  they  who  most  readily  show  the  signs  of  any 
momentary  weakness  or  chronic  despair  that  may  characterise 
the  spirit  of  their  times — any  lack  of  ohjcctivity  of  mind  (in 
the  phraseology  of  Schopenhauer)  or  of  attention  (in  that  of 
Max  Nordau) — any  lack  of  ability  or  courage  to  look  the 
facts  of  life  directly  in  the  face.  It  is  naturally  comforting 
at  times  to  be  able  to  put  one's  self  in  the  hands  of  a  man  who 
had  the  strength  to  assault  all  intellectual  presuppositions  and 
theories  about  life  whatsoever,  and,  in  particular,  to  help  to 
overturn  a  philosophy  whose  proudest  boast  it  was  to  exhibit 
the  intellect  or  the  idea  as  actually  victorious  over  both 
nature  and  history ;  if  one  adds,  and  over  God  too,  one  renders 
a  homage  to  Hegelianism  which  it  did  not — suicidal  though 
it  was  to  do  so — refrain  from  courting,  and  the  pursuit  of 
which  finally  destroyed  it. 

Schopenhauer  first  began  to  obtain  a  hearing  for  his  philo- 
sophy during  the  political  and  social  lull  which  fell  across 
Europe  for  a  few  years  after  the  movements  of  1848.  In 
Germany  Hegel  had  ceased  to  have  any  influence  over  the 
educated  classes.  This  perhaps  was  natural  enough.  Hegel's 
political  ideals  of  1830  may  have  been  true  to  the  Prussian 
bureaucratic  spirit  of  his  day,  but  history  had  not  then  made 
evident  the  great  extension  that  the  German  national  idea  was 
capable  of  receiving.  The  fact  that  Hegel  talked  distrustfully 
just  before  his  death  of  the  English  Eeform  Bill  shows  us 
that  he  was  not  altogether  in  sympathy  with  the  aspirations 
of  the  people,  with  which  all  modern  statesmanship  has  been 
compelled  to  reckon.  Even  the  veteran  Kant  had  hailed  the 
first  news  of  the  French  Eevolution  with  a  "  Lord,  now  lettest 
thou  thy  servant  depart  in  peace  !  etc."  Men  turned  to  Scho- 
penhauer's philosophy  when  they  had  despaired  of  other,  and 
more  real,  things.  The  growth  of  democracy  had  suffered 
checks,  and  the  Utopian  character  of  many  of  its  aims  and 


EPILOGUE.  525 

principles  had  been  made  apparent ;  and  conservatism  had 
awakened  to  the  fact  that  the  past  order  of  things  had 
been  to  a  great  extent  sensibly  and  insensibly  modified. 
Kather  than  have  no  intellectual  food  at  all,  thoughtful  people 
had  been  reading  Feuerbach  and  some  of  the  other  members 
of  the  Hegelian  Left ;  but  they  had  found  that  the  ideas  of 
egoism  and  sensuous  enjoyment  were  very  poor  materials  out 
of  which  to  build  a  philosophy  of  history  or  of  society. 

In  France  Comte  had  come  forward  with  his  ideas  of  a 
positive  and  social  philosophy,  but  the  Germans  could  not 
attach  much  importance  to  a  system  which  seemed  to  demand 
of  its  disciples  at  the  outset  the  giving  up  of  all  attempts  to 
tMnk  the  universe.  Socialism  and  collectivism  and  the  idea 
of  Jmmanitj/  of  course  constituted  the  logical  antitheses  to 
the  individualism  of  which  the  world  had  grown  afraid  in  con- 
sequence of  the  French  Eevolution.  But  no  one  in  Germany 
could  take  collectivism,  or  the  idea  of  a  socialistic  state,  seri- 
ously in  the  absence  of  such  an  organising  force  as  the 
German's  discovered  among  themselves  after  1870.^  They 
had,  in  fact,  before  their  eyes  only  the  extreme  manifestations 
of  both  the  conservative  and  the  modern  spirit :  Austria,  with 
her  hostility  to  industrial  development  and  intellectual  free- 
dom and  her  general  spirit  of  reaction,  and  France  with  her 
whole  political  system  dependent  upon  the  changing  opinions 
and  practice  of  a  single  city. 

Again,  neither  to  science  as  a  whole  nor  to  the  political 
sciences  in  particular  could  men  look  for  guidance  in  the  early 
fifties.  Natural  science  had  not  yet  attained  to  its  splendid 
generalisations  about  life  and  the  development  of  life,  which 
admit  of  at  least  a  partial  application  to  human  society :  there 
was  little  in  that  regard  but  a  crude  physical  materialism, 
which  applied  rather  to  the  machinery  of  life  than  to  life 

'  The  Eisenach  Congress  for  the  study  of  the  social  question  took  place  in  1872. 


526  Schopenhauer's  system. 

itself.^  The  moral  and  political  sciences  having  adopted  the 
idea  of  the  relativity  of  all  social  and  governmental  institu- 
tions and  of  all  social  and  political  ideals,^  were  bewinnin^  to 
write  their  own  history  rather  than  continuing  to  expound 
positive  dogma.  Their  example,  too,  was  being  taken  by 
celebrated  professors  of  theology  and  philosophy  about  their 
own  fields  of  research,  so  that  almost  everything  in  the  realm 
of  theory  was  in  the  same  state  of  solution  and  instability 
that  characterised  practical  matters.  Everything  in  both 
theory  auJ  practice,  in  short,  was  ranged  before  the  bar  of 
the  evolutionary  idea,  the  effort  to  reckon  with  which  has 
constituted  the  intellectual  life  of  the  century  from  Hegel 
and  Goethe  to  Comte  and  Spencer.  Schopenhauer's  phil- 
osophy itself  chronicles  very  well  the  effort  a  century  has 
had  to  make  to  reconcile  its  ideal  theories  about  life  with  the 
facts  that  science  has  disclosed  or  thinks  it  has  discovered. 

Strangely  enough,  Schopenhauer  was  against  almost  every- 
thing that  was  in  vogue  in  his  day.  He  cared  nothing  for 
the  social  question  or  for  the  aspirations  of  democracy.  He 
saw  the  meaninglessness  of  abstract  liberty  and  abstract  justice. 
He  looked  askance  on  both  Church  and  State,  and  despised 
mere  national  feeling.^  He  did  not  believe  in  the  attempts 
of  idealists  and  idealistic  politicians  (ideologues,  as  Napoleon 
had  called  them)  to  think  out  or  establish  an  ideal  society. 
Nor  did  he  sympathise  with  the  intense  devotion  of  realism  to 
the  study  of  history.*  He  was,  as  it  were,  against  both  dogma 
and  history.     And,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  he  also  blasphemed 

*  It  can  hardly  be  said  that  the  materialism  of  men  like  Vogt,  Moleschott, 
Biichner,  or  Czolbe  (or  even  later,  of  our  own  Tyndall)  left  a  lasting  impression 
on  the  mind  of  the  century.  Biology  was  soon  to  carry  everything  before  it ; 
and  we  know  how  speculative  biology  is  always  ajjt  to  become. 

2  See  the  writings  of  Roscher,  Hildebrand,  Knies,  Schmoller,  Held. 

*  He  subscribed  to  the  idea  that  patriotism  was  "  la  jdiis  aotte  des  passions  et 
la  passion  des  sots. " 

*"  .  .  .  nichts  als  Krieg  und  Empiirungen  .  .  .  :  die  friedlichen  Jahre  nur 
als  kurze  Pausen,  Zwischenakte. " 


EPILOGUE.  527 

science.  The  only  stable  thing  about  his  whole  mind  was  his 
abstract  belief  in  Tlatonisni,  and  his  insistence  (due  to  his  un- 
conventional up-bringing  in  an  age  of  criticism  and  transition) 
upon  the  need  of  an  objective  study  of  the  facts  of  the  world. 
He  expressed  both  these  things  in  an  obscure  way  in  his 
philosophy  of  art,  in  his  notion  of  the  Platonic  Ideas  as  con- 
nected with  the  different  natural  species  and  the  different 
grades  of  the  assertion  of  the  cosmic  will  or  energy,  and  so  he 
put  people  upon  the  way  of  correlating  idealism  and  realism 
— Platonism  and  life.  Therein  lay  his  real  work  ;  but  owing 
to  his  lamentable  contempt  for  and  ignorance  of  history  and 
the  problems  of  history,  he  had  himself  no  clear  conscious- 
ness of  it.  He  appealed  to  those  who  were  without  any 
gospel,  to  those  who  felt  that  the  will  was  at  the  bottom  of 
everything,  but  who  yet  could  not  feel  that  they  had  been 
wrong  in  believing  something  else  to  be  at  the  bottom  of 
everything.  The  redeeming  thing  about  him  and  those  who 
began  to  listen  to  his  teaching  was  that  botli  he  and  they  had 
got  hold  of  a  fact  greater  perhaps  than  they  could  reckon 
with,  but  still  a  fact. 

Enough  has  been  indicated  about  Schopenhauer's  own  per- 
sonality to  show  that  he  was  tho  very  man  to  appeal  to  the 
gospelless — to  those  who  readily  enough  believed  that  life 
was  a  much  greater  thing  than  philosophy  had  made  it  out  to 
be,  but  who  were  as  yet  devoid  of  a  philosophy  of  life.  We 
have  suggested  that  Schopenhauer  is  in  a  sense  the  last  of  the 
dogmatic  philosophers,  owing  to  the  very  fact  that  his  first 
principle  is  such  as  to  make  us  feel  that  the  solution  of  life 
does  not  lie  in  the  intellect  but  in  the  will,  in  the  moral  will 
of  the  individual  and  the  moral  effort  of  the  race  to  transform 
its  whole  environment  into  an  ideally  perfect  thing. 


INDEX. 


( Technical  expressions  are  italicised.     S.  denotes  Schopenhauer, ) 


A  hldtunna-kandle,  205. 

Absolute,  the,   45  ;  —  Idealism,  23  ; 
—  freedom,  192  ;  —  Will,  194. 

Abstractions,  156. 

Academy,  the  Old,  337. 

Action,    and    philosophy,    105 ;    and 
knowledge,  183. 

Action-impulse,  182. 

Adamson,  Trof.  R.,  464,  503. 

Adaptation,  Beauty  as,  291. 

^Etiolotjy,  29. 

Agnosticism,  94. 

A-logical,  in  S. ,  92.  See  Supra-logi- 
cal. 

Altruism,  360,  400, 

Animism  and  pantheism,  380. 

Apart  from  consciousness,  98. 

Aper^ti,  41. 

Appearance  and  reality,  63. 

Apperception,  76,  180. 

Apperception-impulse,  181. 

Archimedes,  value  of  his  idea,  31. 

Architecture,  242,  273. 

Aristotle,  6,  9,  10,  22,  23,  212,  216, 
246 ;  poetry  and  history,  46 ;  life 
in  motion,  81  ;  and  S.  on  art,  257  ; 
genesis  of  virtue,  290 ;  292 ;  tra- 
gedy, 295  ;  art,  296  ;  virtue,  334  ; 
on  Socrates,  445  ;  definition  of  soul, 
500. 

Arnold,  M.,  185,  231,  270,  301,  367. 

Art,  philosophy  of,  246 ;  nature  of, 
248  ;  —  what  it  is  not,  254  ;  and 
illusionism,  258,  265. 

Ascetics,  327. 

Aspiration,  29. 

Astonishment,  of  the  intellect,  211. 


Atheism,  not  irreligious,  381  ;  as  non- 
Judaism,  385. 
Atoms,  32,  500. 
Attention,  524. 
Attuition,  157. 
A  u/klUruny,  the,  425. 
Augustine,  179,  195,  378. 
Averroists,  36. 

Bacon,  40,  55,  123,  326. 

Balance  of  power,  339. 

Balfour,  Rt.  Hon.  A.  J.,  104,  417. 

Balloon  and  speculation,  75,  264. 

Bashkirtseff,  Marie,  305,  322. 

Bastiat,  472. 

Beautiful,  everything,  244. 

Beauty,    natural   and   created,    270 ; 

grades  of,  290. 
Iie(jleitvorstellung,     consciousness     a, 

161. 
Bey  riff  and  Vorstelluntj,  128. 
Jienrifdichtuti;/,  philosophy  as,  156. 
Belief,  59,  412. 
Bentham,  337. 
Berkeley,   33,   62,   208;   and  Hume, 

93;  488. 
Bete  humaine,  18. 
Bible,  the,  and  evil,  395. 
Bichat,  28. 

Biology,  S.  and,  288,  526. 
Biran,  Maine  de,  153. 
Bodin,  Jean,  340. 
Body,   the,   importance   of    idea   of, 

410. 
Bohme,  J.,  378. 
Bois-Reymond,  E.  du,  101. 
Bonar,  Jas.,  215,  466,  472,  504. 


2  L 


530 


INDEX. 


Bondage,  moral  and  intellectual,  173. 

Bon  Dim,  408,  409. 

Uosanquet,  B.,  300. 

Bradley,  F.  H.,  517. 

Brahnianism,  412,  425. 

Brain,  and  nind,  13  ;  prevents  know- 
ledge of  things,  97;  service  of. 
199. 

Bridge  between  subjective  and  obiec- 

tive,  79. 
Broca,  on  human  types,  303. 
Browning,  R.,  249,  274,  301,  448. 
Biichner,  526. 
Buddha,  13. 
Buddhism,  49,  79  ;  why  S.  liked  it. 

361,  377,  422,  428. 
Buddhist,  144. 
Buffier,  P6re,  293. 
Bunyan,  378. 
Burdach,  28. 

Butcher,  Prof.  S.  H.,  295. 
Butler,  235. 
Byron,  248. 

Cabanis,  28. 

Caird,  Edward,  LL.D.,  11. 

Calderon,  89. 

Calderwood,  Prof.  H.,  193,  415. 

Calvin,  195. 

Canaille,  la  souveraine,  21. 

early le,  20,  331. 

Cartesianiam,  28,  62,  70. 

Categories,  the,  06. 

Catholicism,  389,  390. 

Causation,  difficulty,  145. 

Cause,  philosophy  of,  32,  93. 

Cells,  32,  500. 

Cervantes,  174. 

Chamfort,  174. 

Character,  3,  27 ;  empirical,  39  ;  ac- 
quired, 200 ;  how  shown,  202,  320 

Choice,  2,  199,  215. 

Christian  monks,  377, 

Christianity,  10,   17,  194,  212,  314, 
319,  386,  392,  418,  424. 

Church,  the,  352,  526. 

Cleuiiiess  of  vieio,  223. 

Cogito  ergo  mm,  70,  76. 
Coleridge,  20. 
Collectivism,  525. 

Colour,  both  subjective  and  obiective 
96.  "  ' 

Common-sense,  64. 
Comte,  525,  526 ;  and  S.,  519. 
Comtist,  the,  and  S.,  359. 
Conditioned,  the,  53. 


Conduct,  I  OS. 

Concept,  the,  S.  on,  121,  123 

Conceptions,  118  ;  in  Kant,  116,  117  ; 

111  S.,  156. 
Couftmoninm,  21. 
Conncience,  as  S.  views  it,  352. 
Couhcious  actions,  180,  184,  186,  20.S, 

Conseiousnesb,  136,  159,  214,  216. 

Consistency,  S.  careless  about,  165. 

Consternation  of   the  intellect,   206, 
211,  213.     See  Astonishment. 

Contemplation,  58,  62,  2i;j,  201. 

Contradiction,    in    life  and  "thought, 
142,  227,  347;  in  experience,  513; 
m  S.,  515. 
Conventions,  S.  despises,  88. 
Corot,  276. 
Correggio,  49. 
Cosmology,  174. 
Credit  (or  faith),  102. 
Criminology,  196. 
Crises,  and  depression,  483. 
Critical  Philosophy,  tlie,  173. 
Criticism,  and  dogmatism,  ,,  8,  510; 

of  lifo,  487. 
Crucifixion,  life  a,  397. 
Cuvier,  115. 
Cyrenaics,  518. 
Czolbe,  526. 


D'Alembert,  335. 

Darwin,  17, 

Definition,  502.     See  Judgment. 

Deism,  408. 

Avfiiovpy6s,  292, 

Dep'-ession,  483. 

Descartes,  62,  310,  311,  358,  455. 

Design  argument,  416. 

DesjardiuSj  Paul,  520. 

Determinism,  presupposed  by  S,,  186. 

Bern  ex  machind,  62. 

Deussen,  Prof.,  469. 

'  Deutsche  Theologie/  the,  378. 

Dialectics,  64,  608. 

Diderot,  28,  367. 

Difficulty,  the  supreme  in  S.,  109. 

Diogenes,  277. 

Disappointment,  200,  400,  506. 

Disenchantment,  a  philosophy  of,  225 ; 

is  natural,  518. 
Disposition,  205,     See  Temperament. 
Dogmatism,  7,  .'i6,  191,  215,  456. 
Drews,  Dr  A.,  .'jl4, 
Drobisch,  77. 
Dualism,  60,  ?59. 


INDEX. 


531 


Aivafiit  and  ivipyna,  6. 

Al/.TKOAOi,   24. 

Dutch  paintings,  245. 

Eastern  religions,  424. 

Eckhart,  .'ITS. 

Eigiiteenth  century,  23,  187,  336. 

Eisenach  Congress,  525. 

Embryo,  the  human,  479. 

Empedocles,  33. 

Engels,  503. 

English  clergy,  S.'a  proposal  for  the, 

132. 
English  Hegelians,  214,  476. 
English  moralists,  223,  344. 
End,  of  action  and  life,  185,  224. 
End  for  man,  8. 

Environment,  a  factor  in  conduct,  27. 
Epicurean  god,  1 49. 
Epicureanism,  471. 
Equilibrium,  181. 
ErlOminfjslehre,  ethic  of  S.  an,  312. 
Error,  greatest  of  all,  132, 
Escape,  from  world,  125. 
Esstnts,  the,  377. 
Euclid  of  Megara,  92. 
E<//foAo«,  24. 
Evil,  337,  395. 
Evolution,  19,  22,  33  ;  and  S.,  359  ; 

of  ideas,  181. 
Experience,    103,    163 ;    what  it   is, 

471  ;  brought  by  life,  495. 
External  explanation  of  world,  441. 

Faculty-psychology,  114. 

Faith,  and  will,  63.     See  Credit. 

Fall,  the,  388,  396. 

Fallacies,  thing  in  itself,  93  ;  supreme 

fallacy  of  philosophy,  150,  434. 
Faust,  174. 
Feeling,  4,   279;   {esthetic,   244;  S. 

fails  to  consider,  480. 
Feelings,   the,   12,  217;  S.  on,  481, 

482. 
Feuerbach,  504,  525. 
Fichto,  2,  44,  454,  503. 
Finite,  defect  of,  274. 
First  principles,  value  of,  205. 
flint.  Prof.  R.,  388. 
Force,  501.     See  Matter. 
Ford,  C.  (•  West.  Eev.'),  362. 
Form,  vs.  matter  of  thought,  3,  33. 
Formal  and  real,  knowledge  is  both. 

159. 
Fouillt^e,  A.,  499. 
Fourfold  Root,  the,  &c.,  51,  64,  113. 


France,  025;  the  New  Idealism  in, 
520. 

Eraser,  Prof.  A.  C,  119. 

Freedom,  Kant  on,  62 ;  how  to  prove, 
17*2,  177,  392  ;  no  immediate  know- 
ledge of,  178  ;  illusion  and  error  in, 
195,  .353,  391  ;  wh.it  it  is,  192,  226, 
352 ;  not  completely  explained  by 
S.,  209. 

French  moralists,  223,  344. 

Function,  best  test  of  reality,  105. 

Gall,  27. 

GekijcnhHtajthiloHoph,  40,  43. 

Genesis,  420. 

Oiinii'tchivHwje,  18. 

Genius,  50,  218,  284,  297;  errancy 

of,  248,  253  ;  and  art,  246. 
Genus  and  species,  38. 
German  Philosophy,  503. 
Germany  in  S.  's  time,  483,  525. 
Godwin,  506. 
Goethe,  14,  40,  60,  87,  1.35,  201,  214, 

234,  248,  278,  292,  298,  367,  308, 

.398,411,466,  481,498,  506. 
(ioldsmith,  333. 
Good,  the,  227  ;  for  man,  134  ;   good 

and  bad,  209,  210. 
(jroodness,  what  it  is  to  S.,  324. 
CJothic  architecture,  256,  272. 
Gozzi,  239,  496. 
Grace  of  God,  411. 
Grades,  of  reality,  102,  161  ;  of  the 

will,  108,  115,  269. 
Greeks,  the,  art  of,  and  S.,  271,  272. 
Green,  T.  H.,  50,  476. 
Griefs  of  life,  214. 
Guion,  Madame  de,  378. 
Gumplowicz,  Prof.  L.,  195. 

Habit,  and  conscious  acts,  204. 

Haeckel,  17. 

Hamann,  428. 

Hamlet,  401. 

Hansa  merchant,  the,  335. 

Happiness,  of  the  individual,  illusory, 

37.     See  Pain. 
Hartmann,  E.  von,  22,  35,  41,  504; 

on  beauty,  300. 
Health,  S.  on,  506. 
Heart  and  head,  26,  213. 
Hebrews,  S.  on  the,  387.* 
Hedonism,  37. 
Hegel.    10,   11,   13,   15,   16,   20,  22, 

328,  357  ;  and  history,  46 ;  "  Idea," 

54  ;  his  "  Absolute,"  55,  492  ;  on 


532 


INDEX. 


the  mind,  102;  the  'Logic'  and 
the  philosophy  of  will,  190,  508  ; 
on  individuality,  106  ;  and  history, 
482;  freedom,  173;  essence  of 
reality,  209;  method,  229;  andf^., 
519  ;  his  influence,  487. 

Hegelianism,  5,  45  ;  reason  of  its  hold 
on  humanity,  76  ;  self-destruction 
of,  524. 

Hegelians,  155,  328;  English,  214, 
476. 

Heine,  13,  248,  299. 

Held,  A.,  526. 

Helplessness  of  man,  210. 

Helvetius,  28,  335. 

Heraclitus,  22,  428,  456. 

Herbart,  77. 

Herder,  14,  428. 

Herrschaft  dcr  Idee,  voluntary  con- 
trol as,  182. 

Hildebrand,  Bruno,  526. 

Hylozoism,  S.'s  philosophy  as,  174. 

Hypnotism,  and  motor  activity,  81. 

Hidden  meanings  of  things,  S3,  87. 

Historical  spirit,  and  S.'s  political 
philosophy,  341. 

History,  despised  by  S.,  46,  164, 
225,  390,  418;  strangeness  of  S.'s 
attitude,  419  ;  need  of  study  of, 
484,  485  ;  philosophy  and,  482. 

History  of  philosophy,  and  oscilla- 
tion, 127. 

Holbach,  335. 

Homer,  171,  292,  340. 

Hooke,  41. 

Hopeful  view  of  reality,  100. 

Horace,  207,  442. 

Hugo,  Victor,  485. 

Human  action,  147,  202. 

Human  beings,  and  art,  289. 

Human  nature,  dignity  of,  484. 

Human  personality,  139. 

Human  purpose,  importance  of,  110. 

Humanity,  to  S. ,  325. 

Hume,  3,  69,  85,  87,  144,  330,  390, 
432,  476. 

Hutchesou,  323. 

Iconoclasm,  23. 

Idealism,  kirds  of,  66,  67,  68  ;  sub- 
jective, 64;  starting-point  to  S., 
65;  as  a  first  principle,  60;  ab- 
solute, 23,  181;  phenomenal,  84 ; 
value  of,  101, 409  ;  and  personality, 
107;  and  materialism,  75 ;  dynamic, 
100  ;   courageous,  427  ;  errors  and 


dangerous  tendencies  of,  74,  75, 
101,  104,  409  ;  persists  in  S.,  511. 

Ideals  of  life,  222. 

Ideas,  the,  75,  107,  125,  235. 

Ideas,  and  movements,  198.  See 
Wundt. 

Illusion,  and  fact,  64  ;  in  freedom, 
353. 

lUusionism,  5,  21,  71,  72,  221  ;  per- 
vades S.,  92  ;  pitfall  of  idealism, 
90,  449 ;  essence  of,  140  ;  in  art, 
276  ;  in  ethics,  347,  349,  350 ;  in 
religion,  373,  374,  399  ;  in  meta- 
physic,  435,  436,  438 ;  of  alterna- 
tives of  optimism  and  pessimism, 
401  ;  easy  to  fall  into,  514,  518  ; 
truth  in,  467 ;  reason  for,  451  ; 
inevitable,  462. 

Illusory,  what  is  naturally,  224. 

Immanent  dogmatism,  67. 

Immanent  view  of  reality,  454. 

Immediate  knowledge,  126  ;  no  im- 
mediate knowledge  of  freedom,  178. 

Impressionism,  302. 

Impulse,  self  as  impulse  or  will,  75. 

Inbe(/riff  dcr  Gesammt-  Wisse.nschaft,  5. 

Individual  only  possibly  real,  106. 

Individualism,  408. 

Individuality,  38. 

Inner  nature  of  the  world,  13,  30. 

Insight,  13,  48,  154,  168,  212. 

Instinct,  4,  26,  39,  176 ;  philosophy 
of,  403. 

Intellect,  41,  92 ;  and  perception, 
167;  S.  has  double  idea  of,  221; 
error  of  S.,  429,  464  ;  mirrors  re- 
ality, 479  ;  characteristic  of  man, 
478  ;  meaning  of  a  good,  505. 

Intellectual  philosophy  is  "  external," 
441. 

IntelkcUis  sihi  pertnissus,  40. 

Introspection,  69,  161. 

Intuition,  18,  40;  kinds  of,  42; 
above  knowledge,  127,  495. 

Irratiomd,  the,  in  S.,  92. 

Islamism,  388. 

Ixion,  251. 

Jacobi,  14,  101,  415. 

James,  Prof.  W.,  423,  502. 

Judaism,  387. 

Judgment,  the,  S.'s  view  of,  165. 

Rant  and  his  work,  7,  13,  33,  34, 
36,  45,  344;  need  of  "learnmg" 
Kant,   96  ;  consequences,  54 ;  neg- 


INDEX. 


533 


ative  consequences,  53,  70  ;  and  S. , 
51,  138,  312,  316,  318,  332,  339, 
357,  365,  487 ;  on  art,  265,  294 ; 
effect  of  study  of,  173  ;  view  of 
inmost  nature  of  things,  209  ;  ciUes 
Zermalmench,  123  ;  dialectic,  70 ; 
moral  will,  309,  524, 

Kantism,  28. 

Kempis,  Thomas  ii,  398,  408. 

Key-note  of  life,  518. 

Kidd,  B.,  417. 

Knowledge,  its  meaning  for  S.,  54, 
64,  79,  135,  161  ;  its  drawbacks 
for  S.,  29,  112,  117,  134,  159, 
346;  dilemma  about,  139,  140, 
152,  154  ;  two  kinds  of,  234  ;  and 
action,  183;  scientific,  114;  objec- 
tive and  subjective,  65,  158  ;  mere, 
136  ;  absolute,  58  ;  inadequacy  of, 
475. 

Koheleth,  the,  277. 

Kiilpe,  Dr  0.,  theories  of  volition,  77. 

Lcesa  majestas,  150. 

Lamarck,  115. 

Lange,  F.  A. ,  52. 

La  Trappe,  334,  377. 

Laurie,  Prof.  S.  S.,  157. 

Lavoisier,  40. 

Leibnitz,  9,  87,  132,  243. 

Leigh  ton,  Abp.,  490. 

Lessing,  254. 

Libertarians,  193,  196. 

Life,  as  a  good,  163  ;  preservation  of, 

181,  185  ;  a  battle-ground,  474. 
Light,  the,  of  beauty,  249. 
Linn6,  115. 
Locke,  55,  61. 
Lotze,  517. 
Love,  59,  197,  45f). 
Lucretius,  92. 
Luther,  358. 

Macdonald,  Arthur,  178,  193. 
Machiavelli,  333. 
Mackenzie,  Prof.  J.  S.,  298. 
M'Taggart,  J.  M.  E.,  363. 
Mainliinder,  486. 
Malebranche,  29. 
Malthus,  506. 

Man,    natural,    17,    338  ;    measures 
reality,  166  ;  characteristic  of,  478. 
Marx,  K.,  472. 
Materialism,  37,  181,  383. 
Mathematics,  471,  505. 
Matter,  and  force,  61,  62,  501  ;  can- 


not  express    the    •'  Ideas,"    239 ; 

primary   and   secondary   qualities, 

97  ;  and  form,  33,  95. 
Maya,  79,  395. 
Merchant,  the,  335. 
Metaphysic,  26,  28,  29,  32,  40,  44 ; 

S.'s  central  thought  in,  140  ;  of  the 

people,  369  (Volksmetaphysik,  389); 

what  it  is,  521. 
Method,  in  S.,  229  ;  in  ethics,  308. 
Middle  Ages,  the,  484. 
Mill,  J.  S,,  23,  62. 
Millet,  J.  F.,  276. 
'Mind'  (journal),  91,  104. 
Mind,  the,  13  ;  objective  view  of,  83. 
Moleschott,  526. 
Molinos,  378,  421. 
Monads,  32. 
Monarchy,  natural    form  of   gjvern- 

ment,  340. 
Montaigne,  358. 
Montesquieu,  341. 
Morris,  Sir  Lewis,  296. 
Mozart,  248. 
Miiller,  Johannes,  507. 
Munchausen,  377. 
Miinsterberg,  77. 
Music,  273,  280. 
Mysticism,  128,  134. 

Napoleon,  202,  506. 

Nation,  a,  nothing  to  S.,  39.     See  S. 

on  the  State. 
Natura  nonfacit  aaltum,  198. 
Natural  and  supernatural,  23 ;  natural 

history  of  will  and  intellect,  198  ; 

science,  525. 
Naturalism,  25,  50,  338,  383  ;  of  S., 

19 ;   and  supernaturalism,  36  ;   in 

art,  302. 
Nniurph^'osophie,  40. 
Necessity,  philosophy  of,  151,   172; 

logical  and  practical,  205,  200. 
Neoplatonism,  315. 
New  Testament,  the,  378. 
Newton,  41. 
Nietsche,  14. 
Nihilism,  72. 
Nobility  of  nature,  218. 
Non-existence  and  Non-being,  mean- 
ing of,  517. 
Non-rational,  the,  16.    fiee  In'ational. 
Nordau,  Max,  512,  523. 
Noumenon,   a   fiction,  90 ;  uoumeual 

freedom,  211. 
Novalis,  33. 


534 


INDEX. 


Object,   nothing   in  itself,    110;   the 

"  Ideas  "  as  objects,  237. 
Objectijicatio)!,  38. 
Objective  value,  413  ;  objective  and 

subjective  knowledge,  158. 
Ohjectivitji  of  intellect,  200,  524. 
Observation,  necessary  to  philosophy, 

152. 
"Only  in   the    mind,"  contradictory 

expression,  97. 
Ontology,   421  ;     becomes    teleology, 

123,  163. 
Opera,  249. 

Optimism,  381  ;  and  pessimism,  517. 
Organism,  idea  of,  47. 
Organs,  bodily,  27. 
"  Ought,"  philosophy  of,  317,  344. 

Pain,  214  ;  exceeds  pleasure,  216, 
219,  506  ;  what  it  depends  on, 
216  ;  a  phenomenon  of  the  will, 
220  ;  how  it  increases,  221  ;  bound 
up  with  life,  518. 

Paine,  T.,  241. 

Paley,  36. 

Pan-phenomenalism,  73,  78. 

Pantheism,  logically  defective,  384. 

Parmenides,  456. 

Pascal,  87,  415. 

Pasteur,  493. 

Patten,  Prof.  S.,  493. 

Paul,  St,  222. 

Pei'ception,  intellect  is,  232. 

Perceptions  or  percepts,  118. 

Persons,  only  real  existences,  32,  307, 
499.     See  Monads. 

Pessimism,  35  ;  grounds  of,  128,  172, 
483,  520;  cause  of,  217;  serious 
nature  of,  219;  of  S.,  477;  and 
optimism,  502  ;  and  philosophy, 
513;  word  rarely  used  by  S., 
522. 

Phenomenal  Idealism,  84. 

Phenomenalism,  52,  173. 

Phenomenal},  and  illusion,  90. 

Philosopher,  pain  of,  451  ;  the 
qualities  of,  497. 

Philosophy,  27,  28  ;  and  pathology, 
143;  the  philosophical  sciences, 
63  ;  nature  of,  497. 

Physiology,  27. 

Planes,  of  reality,  510. 

Plato,  6,  13,  23,  62,  204,  305,  416  ; 
S.'s  study  of,  48,  114;  Thea'telua, 
169  ;  on  art,  257,  258,  264,  276. 

Platonic  Ideas,  67,  108. 


Platonism,  52,  489,  527  ;    excess  in 

S.,  120. 
Plotinus,  378,  410. 
noiTjTTJy,  the,  259. 
Politeness,  a  mask,  448. 
Positivism,  174,  215. 
Possibility,  194. 
Post-Kantian  philosophy,  446. 
Praxiteles,  124. 
Predication,  theory  of,  162. 
Press,  freedom  of  the,  339. 
Primary  and  secondary  qualities   of 

matter,  97. 
Principle  of  Sufficient  Reason,  85. 
Proclus,  164,  432. 
Protagoras,  166. 

Protestantism,  317,  337,  378,  383. 
XlpSirov  y\i(vZos  of  S.,  279. 
Prussia,  487. 
Psychology,  28,  187. 
Psycho-physics,  177. 
Puranas,  89. 

Purpose,  and  beauty,  293. 
Pyrrho,  92,  94,  432. 
Pythagoreans,  378. 

Quakers,  S.  approves  of,  377. 
Quietism,  17,  498, 

Ranc<5,  Abb<5,  377. 

Raphael,  49. 

Rappists,  the,  377. 

Rationalism,  51,  384,  389,  426. 

Reaction  to  stimulus,  177. 

Real  and  formal  knowledge,  64. 

Realism,  303  ;  in  religion,  426,  513. 

Reality,  larger  sense  of,  92  ;  test  of, 
102,  145  ;  different  kinds  of,  129, 
1.38;  of  a  religion,  380,  414;  of 
the  world,  99  ;  what  it  is,  451, 
499,  501. 

Reason,  mere,  33,  55  ;  meaning  to  S., 
130,  1.32,  167,  190;  omission  of 
philosophers  regarding,  134  ;  dog- 
matism of,  112;  value  of  negative 
treatment  of,  133  ;  limitations  of, 
172. 

Redemption,  57. 

Reflex  actions,  176. 

Regulative,  50,  123. 

Reid,  88,  153. 

Relations  of  mental  faculties  to  each 
other,  125. 

Relativity,  233  ;  of  things  to  the 
will,  104  ;  as  a  philosophy,  79. 

Religion,  and  S.'s  philosophy,  57  ;  and 


INDEX. 


535 


personality,  160  ;  cardinal  problem 

of,  402. 
Rembrandt,  276,  485. 
Renaissance,  the,  273. 
Renan,  E.,  11,  231. 
Representation,  78. 
Restoration,  period  in  Germany,  21. 
Revelation,  54. 
Ribot,  77,  182. 
Richter,  Jean  Paul,  334,  433. 
Righteousness,  231. 
Rochefoucauld,  174. 
Rod,  Prof.  E.,  495. 
Romanticism,  76,  252,  289. 
Roscher,  Prof,  W.,  526. 
Rousseau.  174,  323,  337,   338,   344, 

385,  420. 
Rubens,  276. 
Ruskin,  257. 

Saint,  the,  in  S.'s  philosophy,  88. 

Salvaiion,  312. 

Scepticism,  an  extreme  form  of,  140. 

Schelling,  44,  94,  237,  454. 

Schiller,  303,  33 1 ;  use  of  the  under- 
standing, 171  ;  art  and  genius,  277, 
289,  299,  508. 

Schneider,  G.  H.,  77. 

Schmoller,  Prof.  G.,  526. 

Scholasticism,  121,  446. 

Schopenhauer's  personality — 

Personal  equation,  16,  24.  Order 
of  our  interest  in,  23.  Two  ideas 
of  philosophy  to  S. ,  309.  Did  he 
study  science  ?  40.  Literai-y  style, 
34,  262.  Mental  power,  24.  Knew 
the  world,  24.  Temperament,  24. 
Independence,  35.  Candour,  35. 
Characteristics,  433,  486,  505,  523, 
527.  As  a  follower  of  Kant,  113. 
Defect  of  his  mind,  247.  When 
recognised,  524.  An  Idealist,  511. 
High  opinion  of  himself,  516. 

Schopenhauer's  philosophy — 

His  own  claim  about  it,  28,  91, 
391.  Problem  of,  37,  61.  What 
it  seems  at  first,  64,  113.  Charac- 
teristics, 63,  98,  118,  120,  126, 
142,  148,  179,  183,  186,  189,  203, 
212,  213,  221,  225,  310,  409,  425, 
440,  467.  How  he  worked  it 
out,  63.  Crucial  interest  of,  135. 
Hopeful  aspects  of,  100.  Reason 
of  its  vitality,  233.  Refrain  of, 
42.  67,  88,  206,  225.  Illusioniam, 
71.     Difficulties  of,  63,  175,   180, 


450.  Contradictory  tendencies  of, 
155,  515 ;  supreme  contradiction, 
517.  Subversive  and  negative,  133. 
Inconsistency,  so  called,  80.  De- 
pressing, why,  225,  Suffers  from 
dualism,  82.  Charge  against  other 
philosophy,  156  ;  against  the 
"Hegelians,"  113;  overlooks  his- 
tory of  philosophy,  114.  Idealism, 
what  it  is,  104.  Reality,  theory 
of,  104.  Epistemology  and  general 
philosophy,  65.  Gist  of,  7,  135, 
172,  212,  427,  491,  493,  512,  523, 
527.     Lessons  from,  158,  213,  360, 

521.  Basis  of,  472.  Merits  of ,  50.3. 
Defects  of,  414,  458,  480,  483,  516, 
Way  out  of,  507.     Pessimism,  477, 

522.  And  Hegel's,  508. 
Schopenhauer  quoted — 

Actions  determined,  220.  /Esthe- 
tic pleasure,  228.  Allegory,  256. 
Ancients,  the,  and  tragedy,  277  ; 
religion  of,  386.  Architecture,  242, 
Art  and  science,  245.  Artistic 
pleasure  inexplicable,  254,  Artistic 
vision,  240,  Arts,  the,  their  end, 
241.     Atheism,  381. 

Beautiful,  the,  228 ;  everything 
beautiful,  244.  Beauty,  essence  of, 
257  ;  sudden  effect  of,  250  ;  relief 
afforded  by,  251.  Beginning,  the, 
of  S.'s  main  book,  65.  Belief  of 
S.  at  nineteen,  44 ;  belief  is  like 
love,  59.  Brain,  the  development 
of,  154  ;  the  feebleness  of,  13. 

Cause,  discrepancy  between  cause 
and  effect,  146;  difficulty  of  under- 
standing causation,  145.  Centre 
of  gravity,  in  different  men,  515. 
Character,  possessed  by  few,  195  ; 
shown  by  trifles,  202 ;  how  ac- 
quired, 200 ;  elevation  of,  25. 
Choice,  helplessness  of,  183.  Con- 
cepts, the  r6lc  of,  1 22 ;  danger  of, 
130.  Conduct,  on  explaining,  350. 
Conscience,  351.  Consciousness 
dai'k,  356.  Consistency,  S.  above 
need  of  it,  176.  Course  of  life, 
203.  Creed  of  all  good  men,  44. 
Cross,  the,   382. 

Death,  no  annihilation,  375  ;  a 
reprimand,  400.  Deeds  and  dog- 
mas, 349.  Doctor,  lawyer,  and 
theologian,  443.  Dogmatism  of 
reason,  absurd,  112.  Dualism  of 
matter  and  mind,  62. 


536 


INDEX. 


Egoism,  322  ;  and  altruism,  391. 
Environment,  19.  Error,  existence 
an,  400;  no  privileged,  132  ;  errors 
of  good  people,  218.  Ethical  philo- 
sophy, true,  306.  Evolution,  19. 
Experience,  need  of,  220 ;  of  life, 
223.     External  religion,  391. 

Fame,  495.  Feeling,  antithetical 
to  knowledge,  4  ;  causes  of,  217. 
Force,  identity  of  all,  1.  Freedom, 
a  stone  thinks  itself  free,  183  ;  no 
freedom  of  indifference,  197. 

Genius,  uselessness  of ,  130;  rarity 
of,  130;  works  of,  231. 

Hamlet,  the  soliloquy,  401. 
Happiness,  495  496.  Health,  25, 
516.  Heart,  primacy  of,  26 ; 
governs  head,  348.  Hegel's  philo- 
sophy, 156.  Hindus  and  Greeks, 
389.  History,  21,  46,  526.  Holi- 
ness, source  of,  374.  Horizon,  our, 
bounded,  460. 

"I,"  the  unknowable,  160.  Ideal- 
ism, subjective,  66  ;  certainty  of, 
60 ;  easily  accepted,  86 ;  easily 
misunderstood,  101  ;  illusionism  of, 
93.  Illusion,  necessity  of  the  feel- 
ing of,  88  ;  of  existence,  399 ;  of 
youth,  217  ;  in  ethics,  329  ;  in 
life,  448.  Immanent  Dogmatism, 
67.  Immediately,  what  we  know, 
137.  Independence  of  philosophy, 
35.  Individual  wish,  thwarted, 
493.  Inevitable,  the,  206.  In- 
tellect, danger  of,  14  ;  service  of, 
209  ;  instinct  and,  192  ;  function 
of,  189  ;  tarnished  by  its  objects 
222  ;  error  of  philosophers  regard- 
ing, 191,  432;  cannot  grasp  the 
world,  460.  Intention  and  insight, 
168.  Intentive  reflection,  168. 
Intuition  above  thought,  256.  Is- 
lamism,  388. 

Jacobi,  error  of,  102.  Jewish 
religion,  387. 

Kant,  his  method,  116;  unique- 
ness of,  54 ;  terror  inspired  by, 
112  ;  and  problems  of  metaphysic, 
461.  Knowledge,  where  clear  and 
pure,  154,  158  ;  cannot  conduct  us 
to  reality,  113  ;  when  mature,  438. 

Landscape-painting,  243.  Law, 
whether  idea  of,  applies  to  actions, 
177.  Life,  a  dream,  89,  463; 
what  it  is,  38 ;  aim  of,  437 ;  a 
hell,  322;    a  journey,  471;    oscil- 


lates, 513  ;  tendency  to  seek,  199. 
Locke  and  Kant,  86.  Love  and 
Kant,  59. 

Malebranche,  29.  Materialism, 
absurd,  39.  Metaphysic,  453. 
Modesty,  absurdity  of,  516.  Mon- 
archy, natural,  340.  Motives,  130, 
209  ;  and  causation,  147.  Music, 
243. 

Natural  heart,  the,  44.  Neces- 
sary, the  absolutely,  30 ;  neces- 
sity, 151.  New,  nothing,  239. 
Nirvana,  496. 

Opera,  249.  Overcoming  the 
woi'ld,  25.  See  WeUuhcrwinder. 
Own  philosophy,   1,  391. 

Pain,  of  life,  322 ;  our  great- 
est pains,  131  ;  always  present, 
443.  Pantheism,  385 ;  absurdity 
of,  ib.  Patriotism,  unscientific, 
21.  Philosopher,  test  of  a  philo- 
sophic mind,  106 ;  an  unbeliever, 
370.  Philosophy,  problem  of, 
28 ;  nature  of,  156 ;  where  S. 
starts  in,  70  ;  since  Socrates, 
118  ;  begins  in  a  minor  chord, 
436  ;  perplexed  and  melancholy,  ih. 
Pleasure  and  pain,  216.  Polite- 
ness, falsity  of,  448.  Prayer,  the 
Lord's,  354.  Principles,  first,  util- 
ity of,  216.  Psychology,  absurdity 
of  mere,  27. 

Realism,  naif,  absurd,  101. 
Reality,  85.  Religion,  and  philo- 
sophy, 371  ;  and  proof,  ib.  ;  sig- 
nificance, 369  ;  error  of  positive, 
373.     Rest,  none  in  life,  250,  443. 

Science,  need  of  study  of,  22  ; 
limits  of,  30 ;  does  not  satisfy, 
31  ;  ignorance  of  scientists,  457. 
Sculpture,  249.  Self  -  knowledge 
terrifies,  201.  Senses  and  under- 
standing, 119.  Sin  and  salvation, 
386.  Sovereignty  of  the  people, 
340.  Spinoza  an  atheist,  385. 
Spontaneity,  208.  State,  end  of, 
339.  Struggle  for  life,  171.  Sub- 
jective and  objective,  80.  Suffer- 
ing due  to  sin,  394.  Sympathy, 
362. 

Tainted,  everything  is,  370. 
Theism  and  the  will,  379.  Theo- 
ries and  creeds,  319.  Thought, 
determined,  196  ;  how  it  is  inter- 
rupted, 129 ;  dangers  of,  124 ; 
does    not    arise   without   occasion. 


INDEX. 


537 


196.      Trouble,   must   be    in    life, 
443. 

Undeceived,  we  are,  at  last,  442. 

Veil,  tliat  obscures  vision,  395. 

Virtue  not  of  tliis  world,  327. 

Will,    demands   of,    38 ;    lowest 

and   highest   phenomena   of,   150  ; 

relation  to   bodily  acts,    184 ;    no 

general    knowledge  of,    192 ;   aim 

of,  in  man,  199  ;  common  to  man 

and  animals,  404  ;  what  it  is,  473  ; 

cannot  learn  to  will,  148  ;  what  it 

is  to  will,    177.     World,   as  Idea 

manifested,    238  ;    illusory,    258  ; 

has  moral  significance,  306,  308. 

Science,  limits  of,  56 ;  no  science 
of  God,  54  ;  scientific  knowledge, 
30;  natural,  525;  cursed  by  S., 
526. 

Scott,  AValter,  322. 

Scottish  philosophers,  101,  153. 

Scotus,  Duns,  430. 

Secret  of  living,  505. 

Self,  the,  S.  on,  56,  69,  72,  150,  454  ; 
the  knowing  and  the  willing,  73, 
74  ;  as  the  body,  ib.  ;  paradox, 
142  ;  feel  it  but  do  not  know  it, 
160  ;  no  mere,  157  ;  key  to  reality, 
167. 

Self-consciousness,  S.  begins  with,  69. 

Sensation,  208  ;  the  isolated,  80  ;  and 
S.,  119. 

Sensation-impulse,  the,  81. 

Seth,  Prof.  A.,  20,  153,  447,  503. 

Seth,  Prof.  J.,  308. 

Shaftesbury,  323. 

Shakers,  the,  377. 

Shakespeare,  89,  201,  412,  475. 

Shelley,  301. 

Sidgwick,  Prof.  H.,  179. 

Silesius,  Angelus,  378. 

Sismondi,  472. 

Skull,  the,  prevents  knowledge  of 
things,  102.     See  Brain. 

Smith,  Adam,  323,  337. 

Social,  Utopias,  362 ;  action,  483. 

Sociology,  196. 

Socrates,  18,  56,  87,  118,  292,  445; 
S.  on,  313,  332,  337,  339,  343, 
365. 

Solipsism,  71. 

Sophocles,  89,  249. 

Soul  of  man,  500. 

Sovereignty  of  the  people,  338,  340. 

Space,  is  it  real  ?  95. 

Spencer,  Herbert,  338,  526. 


Spinoza,  74,  231,  241,  328,  371,  410  ; 

really  an  atheist,  385. 
Spinozism,  28  ;  and  idealism,  71. 
Spontaneity,  in  the  will  only,  208. 
St  Hilaire,  G.,  115,  303,  488. 
"  Stage  upon  the  stage,"  art  as  a,  280. 
State,    "of  Nature,"    364,  408;    S. 

cared  nothing  for  the,  526. 
Stevenson,  R.  L.,  492. 
Stiomata,  327. 
Stoics,   10,  212,  315,  337,  377,  384; 

S.  on,  130. 
Strife,  much  of  it  illusory,  452. 
Subject,    the   subject   of   knowledge, 

73  ;  subject  nothing  in  itsel",  110  ; 

subject  and  object,  39,  80,  285. 
Subjective  idealism,  66. 
Suh  specie  (eter7ii!at!'i,  268. 
Suggestion,  and  hypnotism.  81. 
Summum  bonum,  32. 
Supra-logical,  character  of  genius,  42, 

463.     See  Irrational,  A-logical. 
Swedish  paintings,  302. 
Sympathy,  S.  on,  323,  490. 
System,  the,  of  actions  and  impulses, 

186. 
System,  S.'s  as  a  whole,  282,  283. 

Tautology,  502. 

Teleology,  8,  9,  49, 163  ;  Mghest  part 
of  philosophy,  468.     See  Ontology. 

Temperament,  an  element  in  philo- 
sophy, 2;  S.'s  own  temperament, 
24. 

Tennyson,  103. 

Terence,  459. 

Terra  firma  in  speculation,  84. 

Terror,  brought  by  self-knowledge, 
201. 

Theietetus,  the,  169. 

Theism,  379,  388. 

Qewpi'a,  62. 

Theories,  all  are  imperfect,  219. 

Theory  and  Practice,  155. 

Theory  of  Ideas,  48. 

Thing  in  itself  unknowable,  53. 

Things,  do  we  know  them  ?  98. 

Thought,  nature  and  function,  149, 
189 ;  appreciated  and  depreciated 
by  S. ,  128;  how  it  focusses  reality, 
124  ;  advantage  of,  226 ;  and  ac- 
tion, 223  ;  seems  free,  208. 

Tolstoi,  512. 

Transcendentalism,  56  ',  transcenden- 
tal idealism,  110;  absurdity  of, 
453. 


538 


INDEX. 


Trust,  414,  419,  431. 
Tyndall,  526. 

tlberweg,  71. 

Ultimate,  meaning  of  things,  87,  206  ; 

real,  502  ;  thing  about  the  world, 

466  ;  questions,  40 1. 
Unconscious,  the,  29,  444,  457,  463. 
Understanding,  the,  50,  55. 
Universal,    philosophy   of    the,    283, 

284;    "universals"  the  most  real 

things  to  S.,  107. 
Unselfishness,    how    it    brings    pain, 

218. 

Vauvenargues,  13. 

Vedas,  the,  89,  378. 

Velle  non  diticitm;  149,  519. 

Verbiage,  Hegelianism  as,  44. 

Vermmft,  meaning  to  S.,  229. 

Villon,  F.,  248. 

Vinci,  Leo.  da,  124,  278. 

Vision,  in  art,  247. 

Vis  medicatrix  naturce,  pain  as,  216. 

Vogt,  526. 

Volition,  everything  resolved  into, 
452. 

Voltaire,  Micromegas,  100,  222,  299, 
390  ;  Candide,  486. 

Vorstellung,  the,  80,  150. 

Vulgar,  the,  their  superiority  to  phil- 
osophers, 111. 

Wagner,  280,  288,  493. 

Wallace,  Prof.  W.,  41,  174. 

Ward,  J.,  353,  486. 

Welteroberer,  25. 

Weltseele,  is  the  WelticiUe,  87,  500. 

Weltuherwinde,r,  25. 

Whole,  how  the  world  is  known  as  a 


whole,  127,   133;  knowledge  as  a 
whole,  169. 

Will,  the,  what  it  is,  33,  61,  188, 
197,  497  ;  and  the  intellect,  61  ; 
and  the  Ideas,  283  ;  as  the  absolute, 
194  ;  is  eternal,  204 ;  is  transcen- 
dental reality,  393;  meeting-point 
of  self  and  the  world,  159  ;  the  in- 
side of  the,  147;  it  is  realised, 
not  known,  68,  162 ;  negative 
aspects  of  S.'s  will,  37  ;  and  posi- 
tive psychology,  182;  key  to  real- 
ity, 473  ;  and  the  Idea,  477 ;  par- 
ticularises things,  465. 

Winckelmann,  236,  237. 

Wirklichkeit,  81. 

Wisdom  of  Life,  S.'s,  201. 

Wolff,  9,  121. 

Wordsworth,  16,  124,  141,  331,  476. 

World,  the,  its  reality,  99 ;  how  far 
we  know  it,  ib.;  as  a  phenomenon 
of  the  self,  73 ;  its  matter  and  its 
form,  69  ;  history  of,  165  ;  scene  of 
a  conflict,  211;  no  natural  escape 
from,  ib. ;  a  Jammerthcd,  382. 

World-will,  the,  and  my  will,  110. 

Wrong  action,  14 

Wundt,  77  ;  on  the  will,  182 ;  ideas 
are  functions,  184. 

Youth,  217. 

Zeit-Geist,  of  nineteenth  century,  45, 
47;  of  eighteenth  century,  336; 
what  it  is,  500. 

Zendavesta,  387. 

Zeno  of  Elea,  92. 

Zola,  17,  171,  432. 

ZoUverein,  the,  487. 

Zoology  and  Anatomy,  S.  on,  22. 


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